Security is mostly a superstition.
— Helen Keller, The Open Door
In insecurity to lie
Is joy’s insuring quality.— Emily Dickinson (Johnson #1434)
Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.
— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?
And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:
And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.— Matthew 6:25, 28-9, 34 (KJV)
You are really the natural form of emptiness, so there is no need to fear.
— Tibetan Book of the Dead (Trungpa/Fremantle)
Firm as the thunderbolt, the seat of the seeker is established above the void.
— Kabir I.68 (Tagore 1915)
The Realized One comes from nowhere and goes nowhere; that is why he is called the Realized One.
— Diamond Sutra (Cleary 1998, 140)
“To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Thanks Gary, that’s a good one!
Here’s another from Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry that’s not as witty but more politically pointed:
“The determination to dominate the universe so that all insecurity, limitation, destruction, and the threat of destruction could be eliminated eventuated in racism, militarism, sexism, and anthropocentrism, dysfunctional maneuvers of the human species in its quest to deal with what it regarded as the unacceptable aspects of the universe.” — Swimme and Berry 1992, 56