Alan Watts Quotes

To remain caught up in ideas and words about Zen is, as the old masters say, to stink of Zen.

You find out that the universe is a system that creeps up on itself and says 'Boo' and then laughs at itself for jumping.

When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point.

You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.

Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once.

In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.

Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.

We must be careful that the business we build does not become mere busyness.

A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.

If you want to stay in a state of illusion, stay in it. But you can always wake up.

But we must not suffer over the suffering.

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever.

How did you know you're alive, unless you'd once been dead?

Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are.

Chaos is always losing, but never defeated

You can't have something without nothing.

What would you do if money was no object?

When you really understand that you are what you see and know, you do not run around the countryside thinking, "I am all this!" There is simply all this.

We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.

In life as well as in art Zen never wastes energy in stopping to explain; it only indicates.

What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.

The best way to convince someone is by making him realize that what you speak came from his own mind.

To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.

Society is our extended mind and body.

The individual may be understood as one particular focal point at which the whole universe expresses itself - as an incarnation of the self, or of the Godhead, or whatever one may choose to call it.

What we need to realize is that there can be, shall we say, a movement, a stirring among people, which can be organically designed instead of politically designed.

As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses.

You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.

Duality is always secretly unity.

Where-so-ever beings exist throughout all galaxies, it doesn't make any difference - you are all of them....and when they come into being, that's you coming into being.

The trouble with many religions, accused of wishful thinking, is that they are not wishful enough. They show a deplorable lack of imagination.

It's time to question a job or career move when it seems like most energy is devoted to making things appear other than what they really are.

When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing but things.

There is a peculiar contradiction in trying to be a member of a republic while believing that the universe is a monarchy.

For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method.

A less 'brainy-culture' would learn to synchronise its body rhythms rather than its clocks.

Enlightenment remains unrealized so long as it is considered as a specific state to be attained, and for which there are standards of success.

To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.

You will begin to realize that if you contemplate long enough on the leaf of the flower, that it involves the whole universe.

To feel that life is meaningless unless “I” can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch.

Do you have any control over being conscious? Do you know how you will?

Truly great companies are built on ideals, not just deals.

You can't figure out the Universe, especially if you're using figures to figure it.

Buddhism ... is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or "loyal opposition" to the culture in which it is involved.

Increasingly, we're developing all kinds of systems for verifying reality by echoing it.

Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery.

The hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests.

Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible.

Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair.