One's life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has… - Alan Watts

By trying to understand everything in terms of memory, the past, and words, we have, as it were, had our noses in the guidebook for most of our lives, and have never looked at the view.

Whitehead’s criticism of traditional education is applicable to our whole way of living:
'We are too exclusively bookish in our scholastic routine.… In the Garden of Eden Adam saw the animals before he named them: in the traditional system, children named the animals before they saw them.

community is its own moralist. It elects and pays judges, policemen, and preachers, as if to say, “When I am difficult, please kick me.

"There is another story of a Chinese sage who was asked, "How shall we escape the heat?" — meaning, of course, the heat of suffering. He answered, "Go right into the middle of the fire." "But how, then, shall we escape the scorching flame?" "No further pain will trouble you!" We do not need to go as far as China. The same idea comes in The Divine Comedy, where Dante and Virgin find that the way out of Hell lies at its very center."