“The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality.”

You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.

No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.

Faith is an act of trust in the unknown.

People can’t be talked out of illusions.

It’s better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing, than a long life spent in a miserable way.

No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once.

One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.

Society is our extended mind and body.

Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt.

Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

The present is always changing the past.

The menu is not the meal.

It was very relaxing to be away from civilization, and this bothered me. I should not have found the loneliness so welcoming.

Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilization reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?

Speech is civilization itself.

Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.

The sum of the whole matter is this – our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually.

There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war.

At the root of our civilization, there is the freedom of each person of thought, of belief, of opinion, of work, of leisure.

We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.