We very often fail to see our present circumstances in right perspective.

Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.

What we think we lack determines what we will become in life.

The limits we assign to Nature sometimes define our own lack of imagination.

The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we're meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe every day.

Our achievements are generally limited only by the beliefs we impose on ourselves.

We let what we know limit what we can imagine; the result, a failure of imagination.

The crux of the curious difficulty lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be seldom correspond to what life really is.

The bounds of human possibility are not as confining as we think they are; they are made to seem to be tight by our weaknesses, our vices, our prejudices that confine them.

It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique.

It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique.

It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique. It's not easy, but if you accept your misfortune and handle it right your perceived failure can become a catalyst for profound re-invention.

It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique.” Thank goodness.

Because our problem, it turns out, was never that we hadn't yet found the right way to achieve control over life, or safety from life. Our real problem was imagining that any of that might be possible in the first place for finite humans, who, after all, just find themselves unavoidably in life, with all the limitations and feelings of claustrophobia and lack of escape routes that entails. ('Our suffering,' as Mel Weitsman, another Zen teacher, puts it, 'is believing there's a way out.')