Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. - Alan Watts

On the one hand there is myself, and on the other the rest of the universe. I am not rooted in the earth like a tree. I rattle around independently. I seem to be the center of everything, and yet cut off and alone.

There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.

Because of his literal understanding of the Christian myth, Western man has an attitude to death which other cultures find puzzling. The Christian way of thought has made so deep an impression upon our culture that this attitude prevails even when the intellectual assent to Christian dogma exists no more. For it is no easy matter to cast off the influence of our history, to be rid of habit of thought and emotion which has prevailed for close to two thousand years. Western man has learned a peculiarly exaggerated dread of death, because he has seen it as the event which will precipitate him for ever into either unspeakable joy or unimaginable misery. Few have dared to be quite certain as to the outcome, for though one might hope for the mercy of God, it was a very serious sin to presume upon it. The sense of uncertainty was, furthermore, part and parcel of Christian feeling for the insidious subtlety of evil, so that the more one approached sanctity, the more one was aware of diabolical motivations, and of the near impossibility of a pure intent. Many sold their souls to the Devil just because this very uncertainty seemed more insupportable than damnation itself