Nobel Prize lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1976/bellow-lecture.html (12 December 1976)
General sources
Context: Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.
“The more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love.”
Source: The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951), p. 32
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Alan Watts 107
British philosopher, writer and speaker 1915–1973Related quotes
This Business of Living (1935-1950)
“We take no pleasure in permitted joys.
But what's forbidden is more keenly sought.”
Quod licet ingratum est. Quod non licet acrius urit.
Book II; xix, 3
Amores (Love Affairs)
“The pleasure of love is in loving; we are happier in the passion we feel than in what we inspire.”
Le plaisir de l'amour est d'aimer; et l'on est plus heureux par la passion que l'on a que par celle que l'on donne.
Maxim 259. Compare: "They who inspire it most are fortunate, As I am now; but those who feel it most Are happier still", Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, Act ii, Scene 5.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 211.
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 542.
“We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.”
Source: The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety