[N]othing that is isolated can live, since the two most important characteristics of life are circulation and change. - Alan Watts

If we are to have intense pleasures, we must also be liable to intense pains.

The fact that happiness is associated with relaxation does not mean that it is impossible to be happy in the midst of strenuous effort, for to be truly effective great effort must, as it were, revolve upon a steady unmoving center. The problem before us is how to find such a center of relaxed balance and poise in man's individual life - a center whose happiness is unshaken by the whirl that goes on around it, which creates happiness because of itself and not because of external events, and this in spite of the fact that it may experience those events in all their aspects and extremes from the highest bliss to the deepest agony.

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way