Alan Watts

It's like your breath: it goes in and out, in and out, and if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible. It's also like the game of hide-and-seek, because it's always fun to find new ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn't always hide in the same place.

salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves

But what are we to do? The alternatives seem to be two. The first is, somehow or other, to discover a new myth, or convincingly resuscitate an old one. If science cannot prove there is no God, we can try to live and act on the bare chance that he may exist after all. There seems to be nothing to lose in such a gamble, for if death is the end, we shall never know that we have lost. But, obviously, this will never amount to a vital faith, for it is really no more than to say, “Since the whole thing is futile anyhow, let’s pretend it isn’t.” The second is to try grimly to face the fact that life is “a tale told by an idiot,” and make of it what we can, letting science and technology serve us as well as they may in our journey from nothing to nothing.