“The truth is that as soon as we are no longer obliged to earn our living, we no longer know what to do with our life and recklessly squander it.”

Part of this quote may actually be by Ralph Washington Sockman.
The World's Religions (1991)
Source: Beyond the Post-Modern Mind: The Place of Meaning in a Global Civilization
Context: In mysteries what we know, and our realization of what we do not know, proceed together; the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. It is like the quantum world, where the more we understand its formalism, the stranger that world becomes.

Standing by Words: Essays (2011), Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms (1982)
Context: It may be, then, that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Speech in the U.S. Senate (2018)

Standing by Words: Essays (2011), Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms (1982)

Source: Maktub

Source: The Dream of a Common Language

Part of an endorsement statement for The Dying of the Trees (1997) by Charles E. Little http://www.ecobooks.com/books/dying.htm.

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 543.