"[A] certain amount of "sitting just to sit" might well be the best thing in the world for the jittery minds and agitated bodies [...]." - Alan Watts

they are but men huddling together and shouting to give themselves courage in the dark.

Death seems simply to be a return to that unknown inwardness out of which we were born...the truly inward source of one's life was never born...Outwardly I am one apple among many. Inwardly I am the tree.

Does it really take any considerable time or effort just to understand that you depend on enemies and outsiders to define yourself, and that without some opposition you would be lost? To see this is to acquire, almost instantly, the virtue of humor, and humor and self-righteousness are mutually exclusive. Humor is the twinkle in the eye of a just judge, who knows that he is also the felon in the dock. How could he be sitting there in stately judgment, being addressed as “Your Honor” or “Mi Lud,” without those poor bastards being dragged before him day after day? It does not undermine his work and his function to recognize this.