Alan Watts Quotes

There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

Beauty is only about relationships. Nothing is beautiful on its own.

My earth is somebody's ceiling

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.

Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.

The dark is light enough.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.

no light no dark no you no me know light know dark know you know me

What darkness to you is light to me

In a certain way, we're always toggling back and forth between the absolute and the relative, if that makes sense.

It's simple. Nothing exists except in relation to something else.

On a really dark night, you can see between 1,000 and 1,500 stars, and there are millions more that haven't been discovered. It is so easy to think that the world revolves around you, but all you have to do is stare up at the sky to realize it isn't that way at all. -Brian Fitzgerald

The star shines for everyone in the world, but in reality, it itself is surrounded in darkness.

Could you understand the meaning of light if there were no darkness to point the contrast? Day and night, life and death, love and hatred, since none of these things can have any being at all apart from the existence of the other, you can no more separate them than you can separate the two sides of a coin.

Looking at the sky last night and the moon in the first fresh dark, just a few stars, bright with their cold flares, I had a little crumpled thought, 'Oh well, the moon. It's just another place like California.' One's imagination drags its feet as we are inexorably hauled into the future.

A here exists only in relation to a there, not the other way around. There's this only because there's that; if we don't look up, we'll never know what's down. Think of it, boy. We find ourselves only by looking what we're not. You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.

We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky.

There is no Jesus without Judas, no Martin Luther King, Jr., without the Klan; no Ali without Joe Frazier; no freedom without tyranny. No wisdom exists that does not include perspective. Relativity is the greatest gift.

Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter.

We are the star and the darkness it peirces

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.

Put light against light - you have nothing. Put dark against dark - you have nothing. It's the contrast of light and dark that each give the other one meaning.

Nothing is good for him for whom nothing is bad.

Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.