humor and self-righteousness are mutually exclusive.

Miles of what used to be free-and-easy beaches are now state parks which close at 6 P.M., so that one can no longer camp there for a moonlight feast. Nor can one swim outside a hundred-yard span watched by a guard, nor venture more than a few hundred feet into the water. All in the cause of “safety first” and foolproof living.

All that such efforts can teach us is that they do not work, for the more we try to behave without greed or fear, the more we realize that we are doing this for greedy or fearful reasons. Saints have always declared themselves as abject sinners—through recognition that their aspiration to be saintly is motivated by the worst of all sins, spiritual

If you go to concerts to “get culture” or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost.

The corpse is like a footprint or an echo—the dissolving trace of something which the Self has ceased to do.

For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, “Now, I’ve arrived!” Your

The standard-brand religions, whether Jewish, Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu, or Buddhist, are—as now practiced—like exhausted mines: very hard to dig.

Just as no one in his senses would look for the morning news in a dictionary, no one should use speaking and thinking to find out what cannot be spoken or thought.

Moreover, as the egg/chicken relation suggests, not all the features of a total situation have to appear at the same time. The existence of a man implies parents, even though they may be long since dead, and the birth of an organism implies its death.