Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.

Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.

The style of God venerated in church, mosque, and synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.

Where does my fist go when I open up my hand? Where does my lap go when I stand up?

Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure.

A person who thinks too much only ever thinks about his thoughts

To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end.