“The basic problem is to understand that there are no such things as things; that is to say separate things, separate events. That is only a way of talking. What do you mean by a thing? A thing is a noun. A noun isn’t a part of nature it’s a part of speech. There are no nouns in the physical world. There are no separate things in the physical world either.”
Watts on Wiggles Waves http://wigglesandwaves.blogspot.nl/2004/12/watts-on-wiggles-waves.html, used in the Cosmosis track No Such Thing (2007).
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Alan Watts 107
British philosopher, writer and speaker 1915–1973Related quotes
“Rudy Giuliani — there's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb, and 9/11.”
Democratic primary debate (October 30, 2007)
2000s
George Herbert Mead (1926). "The Nature of Aesthetic Experience." International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Jul., 1926), pp. 382-393; p. 382
Source: Jargon der Eigentlichkeit [Jargon of Authenticity] (1964), p. 6
Source: Adverbs (2006), Truly
Context: If you follow the diamond in my mother's ring from Africa to Germany to California to Arizona to Wisconsin, in the heel of a grandmother, in the beak of a magpie, in the gravel of the path, in someone else's novel, in the center of the earth where the volcanoes are from, you would forget the miracle, the reason diamonds end up in people's fingers in the first place. it is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes, it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe.
“In life's tragedy, separation is the only thing one sees.”
The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI
Context: A couple, a man and a woman — poor human beings almost always go in pairs — approached, and passed. I saw the empty space between them. In life's tragedy, separation is the only thing one sees. They had been happy, and they were no longer happy. They were almost old already. He did not care for her, although they were growing old together. What were they saying? In a moment of open-heartedness, trusting to the peacefulness reigning between them at that time, he owned up to an old transgression, to a betrayal scrupulously and religiously hidden until then. Alas, his words brought back an irreparable agony. The past, which had gently lain dead, rose to life again for suffering. Their former happiness was destroyed. The days gone by, which they had believed happy, were made sad; and that is the woe in everything.
“Blindness separates people from things;
deafness separates people from people.”