What keeps us from happiness is our inability to fully inhabit the present

Enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy... your entire education has has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.

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

And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.

I want ... to consort with people whose emotions are not ... cold and standoffish.

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.

Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—-to the “conquest” of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.