Does It Matter?
Alan W. Watts
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Instant coffee, for example, is a well–deserved punishment for being in a hurry to reach the future.”
“Evil” read backwards is “live.” Demon est deus inversus.”
“But just exactly what is the “good” to which we aspire through doing and eating things that are supposed to be good for us? This question is strictly taboo, for if it were seriously investigated the whole economy and social order would fall apart and have to be reorganized. It would be like the donkey finding out that the carrot dangled before him, to make him run, is hitched by a stick to his own collar. For the good to which we aspire exists only and always in the future. Because we cannot relate to the sensuous and material present we are most happy when good things are expected to happen, not when they are happening. We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can’t slow down enough to enjoy them when they come. We are therefore a civilization which suffers from chronic disappointment—a formidable swarm of spoiled children smashing their toys.”
“As Aristotle put it, the beginning of philosophy is wonder. I am simply amazed to find myself living on a ball of rock that swings around an immense spherical fire. I am more amazed that I am a maze—a complex wiggliness, an arabesque of tubes, filaments, cells, fibers, and films that are various kinds of palpitation in this stream of liquid energy.”
“Life, like getting an erection, is a spontaneous process which collapses when one tries to force it to happen.”
“In a civilization devoted to the strictly abstract and mathematical ideal of making the most money in the least time, the only sure method of success is to cheat the customer, to sell various kinds of nothingness in pretentious packages.”
“We are particular and temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream that enters us in the form of light, heat, air, water, milk, bread, fruit, beer, beef Stroganoff, caviar, and pâté de foie gras. It goes out as gas and excrement—and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, war, poetry, and music. And philosophy. A”
“the greatest illusion of the abstract ego is that it can do anything to bring about radical improvement either in itself or in the world.”
“The truth is that people who live for the future are, as we say of the insane, “not quite all there”—or here: by overeagerness they are perpetually missing the point. Foresight is bought at the price of anxiety, and, when overused, it destroys all its own advantages. The”
“The concepts of health and sickness, good and evil, better and worse, have the same use and relation to life as those of long and short, high and low to carpentry: even a short piece of wood can be three inches long. Even cancer is called a growth, and when Ramana Maharshi was dying of cancer he resisted the doctors, saying, “It wants to grow, too. Let it.” This is, perhaps, an extreme example of renunciation—not of love or energy—but of willing right as against wrong, and thus of renouncing one’s own separateness from everything that happens, which is what Tillich called “the courage to be.”
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