Alan Watts
Alan Watts Quotes about Love
You can't make love without art.
If you love a person, you say to that person, "Look, I love you, whatever that may be. I've seen quite a bit of it and I know there's lots that I haven't seen, but still it's you and I want you to be what you want to be. And I won't be happy if I've got you in a cage. You'd be a bird without song.
No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
Lack of love for the vegetative, subtle, cthonic, pagan, and sexy aspect of the world means death.
Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated
...the whole universe is through and through the playing of love in every shade of the word's use, from animal lust to divine charity.
Our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don't learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life.
Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith-in life, in other people, and in oneself-is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.
Sexual love is a troubled and problematic relationship in cultures where there is a strong sense of man's separation from nature, especially when the realm of nature is felt to be inferior or contaminated with evil.
There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied.
The problem is to overcome the ingrained disbelief in the power of winning nature by love, in the gentle (ju) way (do) of turning with the skid, of controlling ourselves by cooperating with ourselves.
Life and love generate effort but effort will not generate them.
Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.
We know that from time to time there arise among human beings people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.
The more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually killing what we love.
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
And so when the essential idea of love is lost there comes talk of fidelity. Actually, the only possible basis for two beings, male and female, to relate to each other is to grant each other total freedom.
The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery. We do not realize that our so-called love and concern for the individual is simply the other face of our own fear of death or rejection. In his exaggerated valuation of separate identity, the personal ego is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting, and then getting more and more anxious about the coming crash!
The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.