Alan Watts Zen Quotes

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

Alan Watts

#2. This is not a philosophy of not looking where one is going; it is a philosophy of not making where one is going so much more important than where one is that there will be no point in going.

Alan W. Watts

#3. When life is empty, with respect to the past, and aimless, with respect to the future, the vacuum is filled by the present - normally reduced to a hairline, a split second in which there is no time for anything to happen.

Alan W. Watts

#4. 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

#5. The brush must draw by itself. This cannot happen if one does not practice constantly. But neither can it happen if one makes an effort.

Alan W. Watts

#6. The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.

Alan W. Watts

#7. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.

Alan W. Watts

#8. To "know" reality you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, and feel it.

Alan W. Watts

#9. Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.

Alan W. Watts

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

Alan Watts

#11. Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

Alan W. Watts

#12. The real Zen of the old Chinese masters was wu-shih, or "no fuss."

Alan Watts

#13. [T]he joy of travel is not nearly so much in getting where one wants to go as in the unsought surprises which occur on the journey.

Alan W. Watts

#14. This is what Zen means by being detached - not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.

Alan Watts

#15. It is both dangerous and absurd for our world to be a group of communions mutually excommunicate.

Alan W. Watts

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

Alan Watts

#17. Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

Alan W. Watts

#18. But dispelling this dread isn't a matter of trying to forget about washing dishes, it is realizing that in actual fact you only have one dish to wash, ever: this one; only one step to take, ever: this one. And that is Zen.

Alan W. Watts

#19. To practice with an end in view is to have one eye on the practice and the other on the end, which is lack of concentration, lack of sincerity.

Alan W. Watts

#20. [F]ast intercommunication between points is making all points the same point.

Alan W. Watts

#21. 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

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

Alan Watts

#23. My conscious mind must have its roots and origins in the most unfathomable depths of being, yet it feels as if it lived all by itself in this tight little skull.

Alan W. Watts

#24. 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

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

Alan Watts

#26. I was talking to a Zen master the other day and he said, "You shall be my disciple."I looked at him and said, "Who was Buddha's teacher?" He looked at me in a very odd way for a moment and then he burst into laughter and handed me a piece of clover.

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

#28. For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.

Alan W. Watts

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

Alan Watts

#30. [H]uman experience is determined as much by the nature of the mind and the structure of its senses as by the external objects whose presence the mind reveals.

Alan W. Watts

#31. Essays in Zen Buddhism

Alan W. Watts

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

Alan W. Watts