The emptiness of Zen Buddhism... creates a neighborly nearness between things.

Today, to live means merely to produce.

At the deepest level, the desire for complete union with God exhibits a narcissistic structure.

Without narration, life is purely additive.

The pornographic body lacks any symbolism. The ritualized body, by contrast, is a splendid stage, with secrets and deities written into it.

To die is to wander.

Poems are magic ceremonies of language.

Zen Buddhism is inspired by a basic trust in the Here, a basic trust in the world.

The reason that people take selfies is not narcissism. Rather, it is inner emptiness. There is no meaning to stabilize the ego. Faced with its inner emptiness, the ego constantly produces itself.

The freedom of the 'everyday mind' consists rather in not kneeling down in awe. Its mental attitude is better expressed as sitting unmoveable like an object.

When we resist impermanence, the self intensifies.

The liturgy of emptiness dispels the capitalist economy of the commodity.

The huge laugh is a most extreme expression of freedom.

However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom--that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement. Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation.

Capitalism dislikes silence.

Power is never naked. Rather, it is eloquent.

Money, as a matter of principle, makes everything the same.

Full of gods means full of meaning, full of narration. The world becomes readable, like a picture.

Today, tattoos lack symbolic power. All they do is point toward the uniqueness of the bearer. The body is neither a ritual stage nor a surface of projection; rather, it is an advertising space.

A truly powerful holder of power does not simply elicit agreement, but enthusiasm and excitement.

Happiness is the proof that time can accommodate eternity.

If life is deprived of any meaningful closure, it will be ended in non-time.

Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways, that there is an affinity between us and other people as well as things.

Depression is a narcissistic malady.

Sovereignty, the freedom unto death, is threatening to a society that is organized around work and production.

An absolute power would be one that never becomes apparent, never pointed to itself, one that rather blended completely into what goes without saying. Power shines in its own absence.

The eros-driven soul produces beautiful things, and, above all, beautiful actions, which have a universal value.

Historical time knows no lasting present.

Sabbath rest does not follow creation; it brings creation to completion.

Often what is absent has more power than what is present.

What is obscene about pornography is not an excess of sex, but the fact that it contains no sex at all.

God functions like a stabilizer of time.

Rituals are also symbolic practices... in the sense that they bring people together to create an alliance, a wholeness, a community.

Eros and depression are opposites.

It is a sign of sovereignty to risk one's life, that is, to turn life into a game.

Power turns pure being into a having.

There is no such thing as data-driven thinking.

Information has no scent.

When we subordinate rest to work, we ignore the divine.

When power is separated from any communicative context, it becomes naked violence.

The pornographic face says nothing. It has no expressivity or mystery.

A farewell does not dilute the presence of the past; it may make an even deeper presence.

Those who devote themselves to rituals must ignore themselves. Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence.

Eros, erotic desire, conquers depression. It delivers us from the inferno of the same to the utopia, indeed utopia, of the wholly other.

Following Foucault, we may define the art of life as a practice of suicide, of giving oneself to death, of depsychologizing oneself, of playing.

Violence may capture space, but it does not create space.

Thinking is an expedition into quietness.

Time begins to emit a scent when it gains duration; when it is given a narrative or deep tension; when it gains depth and breadth, even space.

Silent listening unites a people and creates community without communication.

Power is more 'spacious' than violence. And violence becomes power if it 'gives itself more time.' Looked at from this perspective, power rests on an excess of space and time.