Nature, Man and Woman Quotes

“The answer to the problem of suffering is not away from the problem but in it. The inevitability of pain will not be met by deadening sensitivity but by increasing it, by exploring and feeling out the manner in which the natural organism itself wants to react and which its innate wisdom has provided.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“The more a person knows of himself, the more he will hesitate to define his nature and to assert what he must necessarily feel, and the more he will be astounded at his capacity to feel in unsuspected and unpredictable ways.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“In attachment there is pain, and in pain deliverance, so that at this point attachment itself offers no obstacle, and the liberated one is at last free to love with all his might and to suffer with all his heart. This is not because he has learned the trick of splitting himself into higher and lower selves so that he can watch himself with inward indifference, but rather because he has found the meeting-point of the limit of wisdom and the limit of foolishness. The Bodhisattva is the fool who has become wise by persisting in his folly.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“Man when living is soft and tender; when dead he is hard and tough. All animals and plants are tender and fragile; when dead they become withered and dry. Therefore it is said: the hard and the tough are parts of death; the soft and tender are parts of life. This is the reason why the soldiers when they are too tough cannot carry the day; the tree when it is too tough will break. The position of the strong and great is low, and the position of the weak and tender is high.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge construction, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise so long as their progress is considered piecemeal, endlessly having the distance between them. However, as it is not Achilles but the method of measurement which fails to catch up with the tortoise, so it is not man but his method of thought which fails to find fulfillment in experience.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“Life keeps moving on, and yet remains profoundly rooted in the present, seeking no result, for the present has spread out from its constriction in an elusive pin-point of strained consciousness to an all-embracing eternity. Feelings both positive and negative come and go without turmoil, for they seem to be simply observed, though there is no one observing. They pass trackless like birds in the sky, and build up no resistances which have to be dissipated in reckless action.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“[T]o be forever looking beyond is to remain blind to what is here.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“If the ego were to disappear, or rather, to be seen as a useful fiction, there would no longer be the duality of subject and object, experiencer and experience. There would simply be a continuous, self-moving stream of experiencing, without the sense either of an active subject who controls it or of a passive subject who suffers it. The thinker would be no more than the series of thoughts, and the feeler no more than the feelings.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“Our difficulty is that human consciousness has not adjusted itself to a relational and integrated view of nature. We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“[A] life full of goals and end-points is like trying to abate one's hunger by eating merely the two precise ends of a banana. The concrete reality of the banana is, on the contrary, all that lies between the two ends, the journey as it were[.] Furthermore, when the time and space between destinations are cut out, all destinations tend to become ever more similar.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“The common mistake of the religious celibate has been to suppose that the highest spiritual life absolutely demands the renunciation of sexuality, as if the knowledge of God were an alternative to the knowledge of woman, or to any other form of experience.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“Sexuality is not a separate compartment of human life; it is a radiance pervading every human relationship, but assuming a particular intensity at certain points.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“The rift between God and nature would vanish if we knew how to experience nature, because what keeps them apart is not a difference of substance but a split in the mind.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“The highest that man can attain in these matters,” said Goethe, “is wonder; if the primary phenomenon causes this, let him be satisfied; more it cannot bring; and he should forbear to seek for anything further behind it: here is the limit. But the sight of a prime phenomenon is generally not enough for people. They think they must go still further; and are thus like children, who, after peeping into a mirror, turn it round directly to see what is on the other side.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“For if we do not know even how we manage to be conscious and intelligent, it is most rash to assume that we know what the role of conscious intelligence will be, and still more that it is competent to order the world.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“[T]he important point is that a world of inter-dependent relationships, where things are intelligible only in terms of of each other, is a seamless unity. In such a world it is impossible to consider man apart from nature, as an exiled spirit which controls this world by having its roots in another. Man is himself a loop in the endless knot, and as he pulls in one direction he finds that he is pulled from another and cannot find the origin of the impulse.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“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.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“To act or grow creatively we must begin from where we are, but we cannot begin at all if we are not “all here” without reservation or regret. Lacking self-acceptance, we are always at odds with our point of departure, always doubting the ground on which we stand, always so divided against ourselves that we cannot act with sincerity.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“[T]he things which we criticize most readily in others are usually things of which we are least conscious in ourselves.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“It is true that in Taoism and Tantric Buddhism there are what appear to be techniques or 'practices' of sexual relationship[.] Their use is the consequence rather than the cause of a certain inner attitude, since they suggest themselves almost naturally to partners who take their love as it comes, contemplatively, and are in no hurry to grasp anything from it.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“The experience of sexual love is therefore no longer to be sought as the repetition of a familiar ecstasy, prejudiced by the expectation of what we already know. It will be the exploration of our relationship with an ever-changing, ever unknown, partner, unknown because he or she is not in truth the abstract role or person, the set of conditioned reflexes which society has imposed, the stereotyped male or female which education has led us to expect.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“If we are to abandon Newtonian mechanics in the physical sphere we must also do so in the psychological and moral. In the same measure that the atoms are not billiard balls struck into motion by others, our actions are not entities forced into operation by distinct motives and drives. Actions appear to be forced by other things to the degree that the agent identifies himself with a single part of the situation in which the actions occur, such as the will as distinct from the passions, or the mind as distinct from the body. But if he identifies himself with his passions and with his body, he will not seem to be moved by them. If he can go further and see that he is not simply his body but the whole of his body-environment relationship, he will not even feel forced to act by the environment.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“[T]he ego is the social image or role with which the mind is shamed into identifying itself, since we are taught to act the part which society wants us to play - the part of a reliable and predictable centre of action which resists spontaneous change. But in extreme suffering and death this part cannot be played, and as a result they become associated with all the shame and fear with which, as children, we were forced into becoming acceptable egos. Death and agony are therefore dreaded as loss of status, and their struggles are desperate attempts to maintain the assumed patterns of action and feeling.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“In a culture where sex is calculated, religion decorous, dancing polite, music refined or sentimental, and yielding to pain shameful, many people have never experienced full spontaneity. Little or nothing is known of its integrating, cathartic and purifying consequences, let alone of the fact that it may not only be creatively controlled, but also become a constant way of life.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“Man is not to be an intellectual porcupine meeting his environment with a surface of spikes. Man meets the world outside with a soft skin, with a delicate eyeball and eardrum, and finds communion with it through a warm, melting, vaguely defined and caressing touch whereby the world is not set at a distance like an enemy to be shot, but embraced to become one flesh, like a beloved wife.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“[T]he complexity of nature is not innate but consequence of the instruments used to handle it. There is nothing complex about walking, breathing, and circulating one's blood. Living organisms have developed these functions without without thinking about them at all. The circulation of the blood becomes complex only when stated in physiological terms, that is, when understood by means of a conceptual model constructed of the kind of simple units which conscious attention requires.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“My sense of kinship with this world is not only with its obviously sympathetic and and beautiful aspects, but also with the horrendous and strange. For I have found that the monstrous and inhuman aspects of fish and insects and reptiles are not so much in them as in me. They are external embodiments of my natural creeps and shudders at the thought of pain and death.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“The scientist was first discovering the laws of God, in the faith that the workings of the world could be reformulated into the terms of the word, the reason, and the law which they were obeying. As the hypothesis of God made no difference to the accuracy of his predictions, he began to leave it out and to consider the world as a machine, something which followed laws with no lawgiver. Lastly, the hypothesis of pre-existing and determinative laws became unnecessary. They were seen simply as human tools, like knives, with which nature is chopped up into digestible portions.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“Here, then, is the genesis of two of the most important historical premises of Western science. The first is that there is a law of nature, an order of things and events awaiting our discovery, and that this order can be formulated in thought, that is, in words or in some type of notation. The second is that the law of nature is universal, a premise deriving from monotheism, from the idea of one God ruling the whole world.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“We fail so easily to see the difference between fear of the unknown and respect for the unknown, thinking that those who do not hasten in with bright lights and knives are deterred by a holy and superstitious fear. Respect for the unknown is the attitude of those who, instead of raping nature, woo her until she gives herself. But what she gives, even then, is not the cold clarity of the surface but the warm inwardness of the body - a mysteriousness which is not merely a negation, a blank absence of knowledge, but that positive substance which we call wonderfull.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman