212 Quotes by Alan W. Watts

If, then, a pleasurable state is to be conscious, it cannot be constant, for there will be no contrasting ground against which to feel it. Pleasure is thus in fact the configuration pleasure/non-pleasure (e.g., pleasure/pain, pleasure/anxiety, pleasure/boredom, pleasure/hunger, etc.) in which the first term is the figure and the second the ground.

Man makes God in his own image, and as he comes to a clearer and more intelligible view of his own image - changing it in the process - he comes to a more intelligible view of God.

Yet as the world becomes more intelligible, it also becomes more mysterious - not, perhaps, in the sense of being problematic and baffling, but of being immeasurably grander, vaster, more complex, and, indeed, more imaginative than we had supposed.

May not this, then, be why the figure of the Evil One is simultaneously horrendous and alluring: he represents the extreme of ''self-othering," where, on the human level, man is most ashamed of his own organism, and, on the mythological level, Brahma has lost himself most completely in the maya of separateness.

At times when any sort of puritanism is dominant, or any fanatical, one-sided view of man, the ignored aspect of our nature appears as an external devil, sometimes an angel or fallen spirit, and sometimes in the form of other people [.]

Now the expansion of consciousness is no other than extending our vision to comprehend many levels at once, and, above all, to grasp those higher levels in which the discords of the lower levels are resolved.

By and large Western culture is a celebration of the illusion that good may exist without evil, light without darkness, and pleasure without pain, and this is true of both its Christian and secular, technological phases. Here, or hereafter, our ideal is a world in which ''there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away."To give credit where credit is due, it has been a grand illusion.

[F]or wherever the negative force is in the ascendant it always contains, by implication, the seed of the positive.

A world which increasingly consists of destinations without journeys between them, a world which values only "getting somewhere" as fast as possible, becomes a world without substance.