Alan Watts Quotes

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.

Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap.

It's so important to consider this question: What do I desire?

The real you is not a puppet that life pushes around, the real deep down you is the whole universe.

A paradox is only a truth standing on its head to attract attention.

If we live, we live; if we die, we die; if we suffer, we suffer; if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it.

If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.

LSD is simply an exploratory instrument like a microscope or telescope, except this one is inside of you instead of outside of you.

You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.

The question is not what I should do in the future to get it, but rather, what am I presently doing that prevents me from realizing it right now?

If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.

We live in a culture where it has been rubbed into us in every conceivable way that to die is a terrible thing. And that is a tremendous disease from which our culture in particular suffers.

Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up.

Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.

Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it's just doing it.

Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal, for the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever.

We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.

The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge. Just as a knife doesn't cut itself, fire doesn't burn itself, light doesn't illuminate itself. It's always an endless mystery to itself.

Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.

If we are not totally blind, what we are seeking is already here. This is it.

Everyone is the fabric and structure of existence.

I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.

We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.

...the habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism: to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns.

Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it.

A person who thinks too much only ever thinks about his thoughts

To be alive spiritually man must have union with God and must be conscious of it. Apart from this union his religious life will be an empty drudgery, a mere imitation of true spirituality.

Everything is perpetually becoming new.

We all need to go out of our minds at least once a day. When we go out of our minds we quickly come to our senses.

The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from a giant pine that lives for a thousand years.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

The world is in an extremely dangerous situation, and serious diseases often require the risk of a dangerous cure like the Pasteur serum for rabies.

By going out of your mind, you come to your senses

When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.

It is the seeker, who understands there is more than what meets the eye, who is not afraid and makes the choice to go into the unknown. The process of awaking has begun, the discovery is underway.

Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home.

Courage is the goal of cowards.

To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely one with this universe.

If you can't meditate in a boiler room, you can't meditate.

I want ... to consort with people whose emotions are not ... cold and standoffish.

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.

Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.

... preliminary accounting, banking and surveying (known as arithmetic, algebra and geometry).

But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.

When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there...You're looking at you.

The world is a marvelous system of wiggles.

In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.

If a flower had a God it would not be a transcendental flower but a field.