The Chinese word Li may therefore be understood as organic order, as distinct from mechanical or legal order, both of which go by the book. Li is the asymmetrical, nonrepetitive, and unregimented order which we find in the patterns of moving water, the form of trees and clouds, of frost crystals on the window, or the scattering of pebbles on beach sand.
Alan WattsFor there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.
Alan WattsThere is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it.
Alan WattsOnce you've learned to think you can't stop. And an enormous number of people devote their lives to keeping their minds busy and feel extremely uncomfortable with silence.
Alan WattsThe further and further we look out with our telescopes and the further and further we look in with our microscopes, the larger and larger and smaller and smaller the universe becomes in order to escape the investigation because we are the universe looking at itself.
Alan WattsA living body is not a fixed thing but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool: the shape alone is stable, for the substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other. We are particularly and temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream that enters us in the form of light, heat, air, water, milk, bread, fruit, beer, beef Stroganoff, caviar, and pate de foie gras. It goes out as gas and excrement - and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, war, poetry, and music. And philosophy.
Alan Watts