212 Quotes by Alan W. Watts

[A]ny system which leaves the individual upon one horn of the dualistic dilemma is at best the achievement of courageous despair.

This is the whole meaning of polarity, of life implying death, of subject implying object, of man implying world, and Yes implying No. [...] Just as liberation involves the recognition of oneself in what is most other, it involves the recognition of life in death - and this is why so many rites of initiation take the neophyte through a symbolic death. He accepts the certainty of death so completely that, in effect, he is dead already - and thus beyond anxiety.

Life is renewed by death because it is again and again set free from what would otherwise become an insufferable burden of memory and monotony. Genuine reincarnation lies in the fact that whenever a child is born "I" - or human awareness - arises into the world again with memory wiped clean and the wonder of life restored.

[S]ocial institutions are simply rules of communication which have no more universal validity than, say, the rules of a particular grammar.

[L]iberation does not involve the loss or destruction of such conventional concepts as the ego; it means seeing through them - in the same way that we can use the idea of the equator without confusing it with a physical mark upon the surface of the earth. Instead of falling below the ego, liberation surpasses it.

[A]wareness of time ceases to be an asset when concern for the future makes it almost impossible to live in the present[.]

[T]he world of knowledge may, like Earth, be round-so that immersion in material particulars may quite unexpectedly lead back to the universal and the transcendent.

If, then, man is to rediscover his own image in the macroscopic and microscopic worlds which science reveals, this will be the "own image" in which God is said to have created him[.]

[S]exual love is a troubled and problematic relationship in cultures where there is a strong sense of man's separation of from nature, especially when the reals of nature is felt to be inferior or contaminated with evil.