We worry because we feel unsafe, and want to be safe. Yet it is perfectly useless to say that we should not want to be safe. Calling a desire bad names doesn’t get rid of it. What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking it is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it. In other words, if we can really understand what we are looking for — that safety is isolation, and what we do to ourselves when we look for it — we shall see that we do not want it at all. No one has to tell you that you should not hold your breath for ten minutes. You know that you can’t do it, and that the attempt is most uncomfortable.

We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.

We can hardly begin to consider this problem unless it is clear that the craving for security is itself a pain and a contradiction, and that the more we pursue it, the more painful it becomes.

The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.

"Trying to find permanence is impossible, and we ultimately learn that there is no safety in trying to "keep" everything. And there is no safety in trying to prevent loss."

if we can really understand what we are looking for — that safety is isolation, and what we do to ourselves when we look for it — we shall see that we do not want it at all.

we generally find pleasure to be not nearly so pleasant as we expected, and pain very much more painful.

If we can really understand what we're looking for — that safety is isolation, and what we do to ourselves when we look for it — we shall see that we do not want it at all.

The thing is … nothing’s as easy as we'd like it to be. … And the real trouble comes from not knowing what we really want in the first place.

and it is here that we are, in some pain and with no guarantees, working out our destiny.

Those who search for happiness do not find it because they do not understand that the object of the search is the seeker.

The pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in searching for it.

One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing.

We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty.
We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death.
We are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness and incapable of either certainty or happiness.
We have been left with this desire as much as a punishment as to make us feel how far we have fallen.