Top 100 Alan Watts Quotes
#1. So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.
Alan Watts
#2. All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head.
Alan Watts
#3. The harder we try to catch hold of the moment, to seize a pleasant sensation ... , the more elusive it becomes ... It is like trying to clutch water in one's hands - the harder one grips, the faster it slips through one's fingers.
Alan Watts
#4. We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can't slow down enough to enjoy them when they come.
Alan Watts
#5. In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.
Alan Watts
#6. However much I may be impressed by the difference between a star and the dark space around it, I must not forget that I can see the two only in relation to each other, and that this relation is inseparable.
Alan Watts
#7. 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.
Alan Watts
#8. 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.
Alan Watts
#9. 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.
Alan Watts
#10. I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek.
Alan Watts
#11. You're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe.
Alan Watts
#12. Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time as much as patterns in space.
Alan Watts
#13. To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.
Alan Watts
#14. There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again.
Alan Watts
#15. Although profoundly "inconsequential," the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied it lends an unmistakable quality to the work.
Alan Watts
#16. Do you define yourself as a victim of the world? Or, as the world?
Alan Watts
#17. 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.
Alan Watts
#18. There is no coming toward it or going away from it; it is, and you are it.
Alan Watts
#19. In Hindu philosophy the whole creation is regarded as the Vishnu Lila, the play of Vishnu. Lila means dance or play. Also in Hindu philosophy, they call the world illusion; and in Latin the root of the word illusion is ludere, to play.
Alan Watts
#20. 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.
Alan Watts
#21. The difference between a baby and adult is that a baby believes in everything while the adult doubts everything. Babies also only tell the truth until they learn what a lie is.
Alan Watts
#22. That's a waste of time. If you really understand Zen ... you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because ... the sound of the rain needs no translation.
Alan Watts
#23. If we are not totally blind, what we are seeking is already here. This is it.
Alan Watts
#24. You can't get wet from the word 'water.'
Alan Watts
#25. Nets, grids, and other types of calculus.
Alan Watts
#26. The only serious side-effect of # marijuana is that you might get arrested.
Alan Watts
#27. For since there is no real 'way' to sartori, the way you are following makes very little difference.
Alan Watts
#28. 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.
Alan Watts
#29. The materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature.
Alan Watts
#30. 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.
Alan Watts
#31. Just as the ocean is waving so each one of us is a waving of the whole cosmos, the entire works, all there is.
Alan Watts
#32. You are something that the whole world is doing just as when the sea has waves on it.
Alan Watts
#33. Chaos is always losing, but never defeated
Alan Watts
#34. It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.
Alan Watts
#35. And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plowshares into swords
Alan Watts
#36. You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it.
Alan Watts
#37. 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.
Alan Watts
#38. We see what we believe rather than what we see.
Alan Watts
#39. You know that if you get in the water and have nothing to hold on to, but try to behave as you would on dry land, you will drown. But if, on the other hand, you trust yourself to the water and let go, you will float. And this is exactly the situation of faith.
Alan Watts
#40. And so when the essential idea of love is lost there comes talk of fidelity. Actually, the only possible basis for two beings, male and female, to relate to each other is to grant each other total freedom.
Alan Watts
#41. How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.
Alan Watts
#42. This-the immediate, everyday, and present experience-is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.
Alan Watts
#43. Think about a piece of music - some great symphony - we don't expect it to get better as it develops, or that its whole purpose is to reach the final crescendo. The joy is found in listening to the music in each moment.
Alan Watts
#44. That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality.
Alan Watts
#45. No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.
Alan Watts
#46. 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.
Alan Watts
#47. Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
Alan Watts
#48. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.
Alan Watts
#49. We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.
Alan Watts
#50. Where does my fist go when I open up my hand? Where does my lap go when I stand up?
Alan Watts
#51. The trouble with many religions, accused of wishful thinking, is that they are not wishful enough. They show a deplorable lack of imagination.
Alan Watts
#52. 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.
Alan Watts
#53. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam.
Alan Watts
#54. 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.
Alan Watts
#56. Once you've learned to think you can't stop. And an enormous number of people devote their lives to keeping their minds busy and feel extremely uncomfortable with silence.
Alan Watts
#57. The future is a concept, it doesn't exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is always now. That's one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now.
Alan Watts
#58. The real Zen of the old Chinese masters was wu-shih, or "no fuss."
Alan Watts
#59. When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing but things.
Alan Watts
#60. For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method.
Alan Watts
#61. 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.
Alan Watts
#62. So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.
Alan Watts
#63. There's an interdependence between flowers and bees. Where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees, there are no flowers. They are really one organism. And so in the same way, everything in nature depends on everything else.
Alan Watts
#64. How could you say the best form of government is a republic if you think the universe is a monarchy?
Alan Watts
#65. The idea of the Universe being ruled by that marvelous old gentleman, is no longer plausible. It isn't that anybody has disproved it, but it just somehow doesn't go with the vast infinitude of the Universe.
Alan Watts
#66. More and more we try to effect an adaptation to life by means of external gadgets, and attempt to solve our problems by conscious thinking rather than unconscious 'know-how'. This is much less to our advantage than we like to suppose.
Alan Watts
#67. Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it.
Alan Watts
#68. You will begin to realize that if you contemplate long enough on the leaf of the flower, that it involves the whole universe.
Alan Watts
#69. Thought is a means of concealing Truth.
Alan Watts
#70. 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.
Alan Watts
#71. We have a strange anxiety in us; that if we don't interfere then it won't happen. Now that's the root of an enormous amount of trouble.
Alan Watts
#72. There is a peculiar contradiction in trying to be a member of a republic while believing that the universe is a monarchy.
Alan Watts
#73. But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.
Alan Watts
#74. 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.
Alan Watts
#75. The Highest to which people can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes them wonder, let them be content; nothing higher can it give them, and nothing further should they seek for behind it; there is the limit.
Alan Watts
#76. The role of the Guru is to show the person that he already has what he is looking for.
Alan Watts
#78. Our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don't learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life.
Alan Watts
#79. 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.
Alan Watts
#80. Carried to its final extreme, the logical end of this type of reaction to life is suicide. The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead
Alan Watts
#81. What would you do if money was no object?
Alan Watts
#82. Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever.
Alan Watts
#83. Faith is a state of openness or trust.
Alan Watts
#84. Everyone is the fabric and structure of existence.
Alan Watts
#85. 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.
Alan Watts
#86. Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.
Alan Watts
#87. Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure.
Alan Watts
#88. There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it.
Alan Watts
#89. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.
Alan Watts
#90. The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.
Alan Watts
#91. The secret of the enjoyment of pleasure is to know when to stop. Man doesn't learn this secret easily, but to shun pleasure altogether is cowardly avoidance of a difficult job. For we have to learn the art of enjoying things BECAUSE they are impermanent.
Alan Watts
#93. Philosophy is man's expression of curiosity about everything and his attempt to make sense of the world primarily through his intellect.
Alan Watts
#94. No worthwhile life can be lived without risks, despite current American superstitions to the contrary ...
Alan Watts
#95. A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.
Alan Watts
#96. The life of Zen begins, therefore, in a disillusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really exist the good without the bad, the gratification of a self which is no more than an idea, and the morrow which never comes.
Alan Watts
#97. The Tao belongs neither to knowing nor not knowing. Knowing is false understanding; not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it's like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?
Alan Watts
#98. The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.
Alan Watts
#99. Just what should a young man or woman know to be 'in the know'? Is there, in other words, some inside information, some special taboo, some real lowdown on life and existence that most parents and teachers either don't know or won't tell?
Alan Watts
#100. 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 ...
Alan Watts
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