We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them thatexcrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body. Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules. . Alan W. Watts
Some Similar Quotes
  1. The soul is healed by being with children. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  2. Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue). - Jess C. Scott
  3. Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public. - Cornel West
  4. I suppose it’s not a social norm, and not a manly thing to do – to feel, discuss feelings. So that’s what I’m giving the finger to. Social norms and stuff…what good are social norms, really? I think all they do is project a limited... - Jess C. Scott
  5. Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people. - Albert Camus
More Quotes By Alan W. Watts
  1. The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.
  2. This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
  3. The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
  4. If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing,...
  5. Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
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