Great power is worry, and total power is boredom, such that even God renounces it and pretends, instead, that he is people and fish and insects and p… - Alan Watts

Ananda Coomaraswamy once said that he would rather die ten years too early than ten minutes too late — too late, and too decrepit or drugged, to seize the opportunity to let oneself go, to “lay me down with a will.” “I pray,” he used to say, “that death will not come and catch me unannihilate” — that is, before I have let go of myself.

If you look at it carefully, you will see that consciousness — the thing you call “I” — is really a stream of experiences, of sensations, thoughts, and feelings in constant motion.

[L]ife is a system of geological and biological cooperation. Certainly, the system contains fights: birds against worms, snails against lettuce, and spiders against flies. But these fights are contained in the sense that they do not get out of hand, that no one species is the permanent victor. Man alone is trying to eliminate his natural enemies in the conviction that he is, or should be, the supreme species.