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

What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.

We confuse money with actual wealth.

If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.

The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.

Like too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double.

Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

Belief clings, but faith lets go.

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern in the water.

The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from the giant pine, which lives for a thousand years.

Only doubtful truths need defense.

The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security.

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.