Alan Watts Quotes

I'm here. Soon I won't be. Zoey's baby is here. Its pulse tick-ticking. Soon it won't be. And when Zoey comes out of that room, having signed on the dotted line, she'll be different. She'll understand what I already know- that death surrounds us all. And it tastes like metal between you teeth.

Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all.

Every life has a death, and every light a shadow. Be content to stand in the light, and let the shadow fall where it will.

Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.

I balanced all, brought all to mind, the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death.

Animals have a much better attitude to life and death than we do. They know when their time has come. We are the ones that suffer when they pass, but it's a healing kind of grief that enables us to deal with other griefs that are not so easy to grab hold of.

Eros is very close to death. And both things, in a way, balance each other.

Life and death. They are somehow sweetly and beautifully mixed, but I don't know how.

Everything that is necessary is also easy. You just have to accept it. And the most necessary, the most natural matter on this planet is death.

If you haven't understood that if you are born you die, you scarcely deserve to be able to be alive.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.

Anyone can stop a man's life, but no one his death; a thousand doors open on to it.

What we put into every moment is all we have. You can drug yourself to death or you can smoke yourself to death or eat yourself to death, or you can do everything right and be healthy and then get hit by a car. Life is so great, such a neat thing, and yet all during it we have to face death, which can make you nuts and depressed.

Look at everything that exists, and observe that it is already in dissolution and in change, and as it were putrefaction or dispersion, or that everything is so constituted by nature as to die.

There are few of us but who have been touched somehow by death. Some may not have been touched closely by it nor yet have kept vigil with it, but somewhere along our lives, most of us are sorely bereft of someone near and deeply cherished - and all of us will some day meet it face to face.

Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.

Today will die tomorrow.

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying: Everything!

One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.

We die, because we live.

Death then, being the way and condition of life, we cannot love to live if we cannot bear to die.

You will die not because you're ill, but because you're alive.

If I were a maker of books I should compile a register, with comments, of different deaths. He who should teach people to die, would teach them to live.

Death, like the sun, cannot be looked at steadily.