Every time I come across a rattlesnake on my farm I initially react in fear and am tempted to kill it. Then I realize I wouldn't want to live in a world where all wild things - without and within - are domesticated.

As a mode of perception that often becomes a style of life, paranoia weaves around the vulnerable self or group an air-tight metaphysic and world view. Paranoia is an antireligious mysticism based on the feeling or perception that the world in general, and others in particular, are against me or us. Reality is perceived as hostile. By contrast, the religious mystic experiences the ground of being as basically friendly to the deepest needs of the self. That which is unknown, strange, or beyond our comprehension is with and for rather than against us.

The more you become a connoisseur of gratitude, the less you are a victim of resentment, depression, and despair.

We suffer from the illusion that the faster we run, the more likely we are to grasp happiness. The truth is that the velocity necessary for success rarely exceeds the rate of reflection.

The Greeks invented the idea of nemesis to show how any single virtue, stubbornly maintained gradually changes into a destructive vice. Our success, our industry, our habit of work have produced our economic nemesis. Work made modern men great, but now threatens to usurp our souls, to inundate the earth in things and trash, to destroy our capacity to love and wonder.

To sustain love, a man and a woman must continually be marrying and divorcing, moving with, against, away from, and beyond each other, saying 'yes' and 'no'.

The more we chase away the false mysteries - those things we think we know about ourselves and others - the more mysterious our existence becomes.