“It's pleasing to realize that quite a few people enjoy this sort of playfulness and that they are not afraid to look at the relative nature of rock-hard reality.”

citation needed
Marriage

Source: The Meaning of Culture (1929), p. 178
Source: A Glastonbury Romance
Context: It is strange how few people make more than a casual cult of enjoying Nature. And yet the earth is actually and literally the mother of us all. One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.

Source: The Lady in the Lake (1943), chapter 1
Context: The little blonde at the PBX cocked a shell-like ear and smiled a small fluffy smile. She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don't care much about kittens.

High Times interview (2002)
Context: Usually, my witticisms are composed on the spot. They're simply intrinsic; an inseparable, integral, organic part of my writing process — doubtlessly because humor is an inseparable, integral part of my philosophical worldview. The comic sensibility is vastly, almost tragically, underrated by Western intellectuals. Humor can be a doorway into the deepest reality, and wit and playfulness are a desperately serious transcendence of evil. My comic sense, although deliberately Americanized, is, in its intent, much closer related to the crazy wisdom of Zen monks and the goofy genius of Taoist masters than it is to, say, the satirical gibes on Saturday Night Live. It has both a literary and a metaphysical function.

Source: The Bronze Horseman

On Bolshevism, in Law, Life, and Letters (1927), Vol. 2, Ch. 19

Source: Comically Inefficient: Joseph Herscher’s Machines https://ars.electronica.art/aeblog/en/2017/08/22/joseph-herscher-machines/ (Aug 22, 2017)

Source: Heroes of the Valley