What does any group of people like to do when they don’t have to do anything? As far as I can tell, people get together and do something rhythmic — t… - Alan Watts

We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.

For there are fashions in myth, and the world-conquering West of the nineteenth century needed a philosophy of life in which realpolitik — victory for the tough people who face the bleak facts — was the guiding principle. Thus the bleaker the facts you face, the tougher you seem to be.

Sometimes I get the queerest feeling that things going on in the world around one, are in some odd way reflections of things happening in the depths of one’s own mind. It is almost as if the world gets calm as you keep calm yourself, and vice versa.