Alan Watts Life Death Quotes & Sayings

The labor leader Samuel Gompers had long considered the production of cigars in unsanitary tenements "one of the most dreadful, cancerous sores" on the city of New York. Realizing — Doris Kearns Goodwin

The meaning of being alive is just being alive — Alan W. Watts

You've dated a shoplifter. A drug addict. A girl who claimed that her roommate kept her locked in a dumpster. She was admitted to Mulberry not too long ago, if I recall, right? They diagnosed her with schizophrenia." Reece nodded reluctantly. "For the record, I only dated her for two months. And also for the record, she's doing a lot better." "Hmm," Camden replied. "There's the one who put salt on all her food then complained incessantly of bloating problems. Oh yeah! And the one who wanted you to tie her up and beat the shit out of her every night." "All right already!" Reece snapped. "I get it. I haven't had the best of luck with normal women. — S. Walden

Upon her Center pois'd, when on a day (For Time, though in Eternitie, appli'd To motion, measures all things durable By present, past, and future) on such — John Milton

When each moment becomes an expectation life is deprived of fulfillment, and death is dreaded for it seems that here expectation must come to an end. — Alan W. Watts

When you are dying and coming to life in each moment, would-be scientific predictions about what will happen after death are of little consequence. The whole glory of it is that we do not know. Ideas of survival and annihilation are alike based on the past, on memories of waking and sleeping, and, in their different ways, the notions of everlasting continuity and everlasting nothingness are without meaning. It needs but slight imagination to realize that everlasting time is a monstrous nightmare, so that between heaven and hell as ordinarily understood there is little to choose. — Alan W. Watts

If you've ever come across a tree that you've lived with for many years and then one day it's blown over, there's incredible shock and violence about that. — Andy Goldsworthy

We have been accustomed to make this existence worth-while by the belief that there is more than the outward appearance
that we live for a future beyond this life here. For the outward appearance does not seem to make sense. if living is to end in pain, incompleteness, and nothingness, it seems a cruel and futile experience for being who are born to reason, hope, create, and love. man, as a being of sense, wants his life to make sense, and he has found it hard to believe that it does so unless there is more that what he see
unless there is an eternal order and an eternal life behind the uncertain and momentary experience of life-and-death. — Alan W. Watts

Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified. — Alan W. Watts

When you play a character that is so emotionally closed there are times when you ask yourself if you are doing enough and if it's reading. That is where you have a director, who is the barometer of what you are doing. — Gary Oldman

In researching 'The Luminaries,' I did read quite a lot of 20th-century crime. My favourites out of that were James M. Cain, Dassiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith. — Eleanor Catton

level, and I still — Tijan

Everybody should do in their lifetime, sometime, two things. One is to consider death ... to observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up-never. That is a most gloomy thing for contemplation; it's like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative of creating life. You'll get wonderful things out of that. — Alan Watts

Death seems simply to be a return to that unknown inwardness out of which we were born ... the truly inward source of one's life was never born ... Outwardly I am one apple among many. Inwardly I am the tree. — Alan W. Watts

The precious ... uniqueness which the human individual claims is conferred on him not by possession of an immortal soul but by possession of a mortal body. ... If death gives life individuality and if man is the organism which represses death, then man is the organism which represses his own individuality. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death — Alan W. Watts

When death comes, it's just like winter. We don't say, "There ought not to be winter." That the winter season, when the leaves fall and the snow comes, is some kind of defeat, something which we should hold out against. No. Winter is part of the natural course of events. No winter, no summer. No cold, no heat. — Alan Watts

Many Buddhists understand the Round of birth-and-death quite literally as a process of reincarnation, wherein the karma which shapes the individual does so again and again in life after life until, through insight and awakening, it is laid to rest. But in Zen, and in other schools of the Mahayana, it is often taken in a more figurative way, as that the process of rebirth is from moment to moment, so that one is being reborn so long as one identifies himself with a continuing ego which reincarnates itself afresh at each moment of time. Thus the validity and interest of the doctrine does not require acceptance of a special theory of survival. — Alan W. Watts

Subjectively, a gnat doubtless feels that its span of a few days is a reasonably long lifetime. A tortoise, with its span of several hundred years, would feel subjectively the same as the gnat. Not so long ago the life expectancy of the average man was about forty-five years. Today it is from sixty-five to seventy years, but subjectively the years are faster, and death, when it comes, is always all too soon. — Alan W. Watts

When I stand by the stream and watch it, I am relatively still, and the flowing water makes a path across my memory so that I realize its transience in comparison with my stability. This is, of course, an illusion in the sense that I, too, am in flow and likewise have no final destination - for can anyone imagine finality as a form of life? My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern in the water. Feeling — Alan W. Watts

The rise of the iPod meant that digital music became the norm, It's sad, but you can still find the real stuff out there if you look for it! — Peter Hook

Life seems to be a system that eats itself to death, and in which victory equals defeat. — Alan W. Watts

The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the "I" out of the experience. We pretend that we are amoebas, and try to protect ourselves from life by splitting in two. Sanity, wholeness, and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate "I" or mind can be found. — Alan W. Watts

Thus not to see the unity of self and other is the fear of life, and not to see the unity of being and nonbeing is the fear of death. — Alan W. Watts

Nothing is more creative than death, since it has the whole secret of life. It means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that 'I' cannot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. When a man knows this, he lives for the first time in his life. By holding his breath, he loses it. By letting go he finds it. — Alan Watts

Everything this series is being built up to be - I think it's going to live up to those expectations. — Matthew Hayden

Then he, Luke, Mace, Lee, Hank and Eddie (not to mention Tex and Duke) took off, each one wearing a scary-angry look on their face. In about ten minutes there was no more noise and they all came back with a shitload of confiscated fireworks. — Kristen Ashley