212 Quotes by Alan W. Watts

To hate death and change is trying to make life deathless and changeless, and this is rigid. moribund, living death

[N]othing that is isolated can live, since the two most important characteristics of life are circulation and change.

Earth is in heaven. It spins, falls, and floats in a spiral nebula. Earth is not opposed to heaven: it belongs in it as a member of the whole company of the stars.

Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.

Our progress has been almost exclusively technological, which means that we are able to manipulate the physical world ever more sensationally, to increase the speed, the span, and the powers of material existence without any clear idea of what to do with the time gained and the powers acquired.

For our radically misnamed “materialistic” civilization must above all cultivate the love of material, of earth, air, and water, of mountains and forests, of excellent food and imaginative housing and clothing, and of cherishing our artfully erotic contacts between human bodies. Certainly, all these so–called “things” are as impermanent as ripples in water, but what life, what love, what energy is there in a perfectly pure abstraction or a totally solid and eternally indestructible rock?

You cannot teach an ego to be anything but egotistic, even though egos have the subtlest ways of pretending to be reformed.

The realm of liberation is absolutely incommensurable with the relativities of higher and lower, better and worse, gain and loss, since these are all disadvantages of the ego.

There are various levels above and below the human through which the individual soul may pass in the course of its reincarnations—the angelic, the titanic, the animal, the purgatories, and the realm of the frustrated ghosts.