What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.

Trying to pretend to oneself that a life of constant self frustration was in fact a great spiritual attainment.

No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

God is the Self of the world, but you can't see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can't see your own eyes, and you certainly can't bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding.

Real freedom cannot exist alongside false freedom, but the abandonment of false freedom looks as if it would leave you as good as dead. But this is the secret of Goethe's Stirb und werde, Die and come to life. For the job of compassion in a sick society only the dead need apply.

It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd—uncanny and highly improbable.

We learn nothing of very much importance when it can be explained entirely in terms of past experience. If it were possible to understand all things in terms of what we know already, we could convey the sense of color to a blind man with nothing but sound, taste, touch, and smell.