Alan Watts Quotes

One idea I explore in my stand-up show is whether, if you try looking at the universe rationally and avoid coping mechanisms like mysticism or religion, you can still be happy knowing you are going to die after a brief time on this spinning ball.

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.

To be human is to keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence, hollering, 'What's it for?'

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

I've just kept going, like millions of people do every day, because life does not allow them to do anything else.

This could be a whole life," she thought. "You work eight hours a day covering wires to earn money to buy food and to pay for a place to sleep so that you can keep living to come back to cover more wires. Some people are born and kept living just to come to this.

With slow-moving zombies, what always comes at stake is our humanity.

Most people are living lives of sort of survival. And constantly posing an existential crisis, either through fantasy or oblivion, really has been pretty much explored in rock and roll. At least in the western version of rock n' roll.

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

What, if as said, man is a bubble.

The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.

I hate to think life is just facts and laws.

By default, most of us have taken the dare to simply survive. Exist. Get through. For the most part, we live numb to life - we've grown weary and apathetic and jaded... and wounded.

So few humans seem to fully exist themselves that I wonder if all this endless speculation and haggling about God is really an exploration of a more interesting and embarrassing question about ourselves.

In hard-core science fiction in which characters are responding to a change in environment, caused by nature or the universe or technology, what readers want to see is how people cope, and so the character are present to cope, or fail to cope.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition. Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them.

Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.

Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.

If you don't ponder the end of the world on a regular basis, I don't think you're really human.

All of the characters I've had the chance to create are survivors. But we live in a world where surviving makes up most of what we do.

Literature hasn't come up with any new themes. The literature of all different times - it's still dealing with how one resolves issues of existence.

I'm a Nietzschean scholar. I've read an immense amount about nihilism and existentialism.