Alan Watts Quotes

How could you say the best form of government is a republic if you think the universe is a monarchy?

A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.

Life and love generate effort but effort will not generate them.

For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase—oddly enough—to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization.

No worthwhile life can be lived without risks, despite current American superstitions to the contrary.

But the disappearance of the effort to let go is precisely the disappearance of the separate thinker, of the ego trying to watch the mind without interfering.

We tend to regard ourselves as puppets of the Past, driven along by something that is always behind us.

You are something that the whole world is doing just as when the sea has waves on it.

I would suggest that today, we know about as much concerning the human mind as we knew about the galaxy in 1300.

What are we saying when we say now, something is holy? That means you should take a different attitude to what you are doing than if you were, for example, doing it for kicks.

Where does my fist go when I open up my hand? Where does my lap go when I stand up?

The role of the Guru is to show the person that he already has what he is looking for.

Any systems approaching perfect self-control also approaches perfect self-frustration.

No one's mouth is big enough to utter the whole thing.

I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek.

Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.

I have no other self than the totality of the things of which I am aware.

...the whole universe is through and through the playing of love in every shade of the word's use, from animal lust to divine charity.

For we have never actually understood the revolutionary sense beneath them – the incredible truth that what religion calls the vision of God is found in giving up any belief in the idea of God.

Religion is always falling apart.

Philosophy is man’s expression of curiosity about everything and his attempt to make sense of the world primarily through his intellect.

Cows scream louder than carrots.

These people, as far as I can see, do not congregate in the notorious centers of the movement, like the North Beach in San Francisco or Greenwich Village, or Venice, California.

Just as the ocean is waving so each one of us is a waving of the whole cosmos, the entire works, all there is.

That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality.

... nets, grids, and other types of calculus.

The sense of wrong is simply failure to see where something fits into a pattern, to be confused as to the hierarchical level upon which an event belongs.

Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time as much as patterns in space.

Beyond positive and negative, what is Reality?

...for since there is no real 'way' to sartori, the way you are following makes very little difference.

Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person.

I have always thought that all philosophical debates are ultimately between the partisans of structure and the partisans of "goo.

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel for love is not ours to command.

Zen is a way of liberation concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous but what is.

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.

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

Faith is above all openness an act of trust in the unknown.

This-the immediate everyday and present experience-is IT the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.

I have realized that the past and the future are real illusions that they exist only in the present which is what there is and all that there is.

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

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.

No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.