Alan W. Watts

Quotes

• “Working rightly, the brain is the highest form of "instinctual wisdom." Thus it should work like the homing instinct of ...”
• “If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or...”
• “[I]t would seem that to be incapable of sitting and watching with the mind completely at rest is to be incapable of expe...”
• “Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive; survival -going on ...”
• “To notice is to select, toregard some bits of perception, or some features of the world, as morenoteworthy, more signifi...”
• “[I]t is typical of Zen that its style of action has the strongest feeling of commitment, of "follow-through." It enters ...”
• “The answer to the problem of suffering is not away from the problem but in it. The inevitability of pain will not be met...”
• “Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - me...”
• “The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events - that the world be...”
• “Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is ...”
• “The common mistake of the religious celibate has been to suppose that the highest spiritual life absolutely demands the ...”
• “God is the Self of the world, but you can't see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can't see your own e...”
• “If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'...”
• “In a relativistic universe you don't cling to anything, you learn to swim. And you know what swimming is - it's kind of ...”
• “And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning,...”
• “There are various levels above and below the human through which the individual soul may pass in the course of its reinc...”
• “Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirro...”
• “Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time t...”
• “Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We ar...”
• “And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of da...”
• “The realm of liberation is absolutely incommensurable with the relativities of higher and lower, better and worse, gain ...”
• “If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in...”
• “We might 'conquer' nature if we could first, or at the same time, conquer our own nature, though we do not see that huma...”
• “No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be m...”
• “W might 'conquer' nature if we could first, or at the same time, conquer our own nature, though we do not see that human...”
• “So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving...”
• “There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that know...”
• “My conscious mind must have its roots and origins in the most unfathomable depths of being, yet it feels as if it lived ...”
• “To practice with an end in view is to have one eye on the practice and the other on the end, which is lack of concentrat...”
• “Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal some...”
• “The brush must draw by itself. This cannot happen if one does not practice constantly. But neither can it happen if one ...”
• “I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and ...”
• “Money alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent...”
• “You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean...”
• “Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the u...”
• “Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.”
• “For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.”
• “When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of … Nothing is left but to love.”
• “One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.”
• “Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way”
• “To "know" reality you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, and feel it.”
• “It is both dangerous and absurd for our world to be a group of communions mutually excommunicate.”
• “Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.”
• “In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.”
• “The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.”
• “Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.”
• “Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.”
• “People become concerned with being more humble than other people.”
• “Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them.”
• “To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead.”