Alan Watts Quotes

Running away from fear is fear; fighting pain is pain; trying to be brave is being scared

Faith...is letting go and trusting oneself to the unknown.

At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but do not seem to make a "problem" of it.

The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.

Black implies white self implies other

All I'm saying is that minerals are just a rudimentary form of consciousness whereas the other people are saying that consciousness is a complicated form of minerals.

We are all as much extraordinary phenomena of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars and the form of a galaxy.

And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plowshares into swords

Everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality.

Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about "I".

Thought is a means of concealing Truth.

Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.

...mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.

The anitya doctrine is, again, not quite the simple assertion that the world is impermanent, but rather that the more one grasps at the world, the more it changes.

In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.

Many people think that the Bible is the authentic word of God and they worship the Bible, making it an idol.

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time

When one speaks of awakening, it means de-hypnotizatio n; coming to your senses. But of course to do that, you have to go out of your mind.

In Zen, poverty is voluntary, and considered not really as poverty so much as simplicity, freedom, unclutteredness.

The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

The wake doesn't drive the ship

The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is

There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied.

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens.

...[W]ords can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.

A holy person is someone who is whole; who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites.

The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.

What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.

The more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually killing what we love.

Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars.

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.

And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment.

The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings, the past and the future are not as real, but rather more real than the present.

A chest of gold coins or a fat wallet of bills is of no use whatsoever to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft.

The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.

Change is an illusion because we're always at the place where any future can take us.

You can't get wet from the word 'water.'

Nothing fails like success—because the self-imposed task of our society and all its members is a contradiction: to force things to happen which are acceptable only when they happen without force.

I too realize that the less I preach the more likely I am to be heard.

Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.

To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.

For a decision-the freest of my actions just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.

You don't need to try to be God, you are! But if you try to be God it means you don't know you are.

We usually don't look. We overlook.