The Wisdom of Insecurity

To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.

To discover the ultimate Reality of life... you must cease to try to grasp it in the forms of idols.

By all outward appearances our life is a span of light between one eternal darkness and another.

The more we are able to feel pleasure, the more we are vulnerable to pain.

Today's education might leave individuals touched by doubt, finding it hard to believe in an eternal order.

When belief in the eternal becomes impossible, and there is only the poor substitute of belief in believing, men seek their happiness in the guise of pleasures.

If we cannot live happily without an assured future, we are certainly not adapted to living in a finite world.

For the outward appearance does not seem to make sense. If living is to end in pain, incompleteness, and nothingness, it seems a cruel and futile experience for beings who are born to reason, hope, create, and love.

If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.

To strive for pleasure to the exclusion of pain is, in effect, to strive for the loss of consciousness.