"comfort is a means, not an end. the modern world seems to regard it as an end in itself, an absolute good. one day, perhaps, the earth will have been turned into one vast feather-bed, with man's body dozing on top of it and his mind underneath, like desdemona, smothered"

"the condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system is universal craving...desirelessness is the condition of deliverance and illumination."

-Aldous Huxley

And through Dr. Miller in Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza:

"i've never really liked it, you know. not what's ordinarily meant by prayer at any rate. all that asking for special favours and guidances and forgivenesses--i've always found that it tends to make one egotistical, preoccupied with one's own ridiculous, self-important little personality. when you pray in the ordinary way, you're merely rubbing yourself into yourself. you return to your own vomit, if you see what i mean. whereas what we're all looking for is some way of getting beyond our own vomit."

i need to read Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy i think.