Alan Watts Quotations

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.

No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

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.

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.

And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.

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.

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

In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.

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

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

But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

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.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

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

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.

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

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

Faith is a state of openness or trust.

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

Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it's just doing it.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

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

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

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

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.

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

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.

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.

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.

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

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.

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

So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.

The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.

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

But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.

Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.

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.

LSD is simply an exploratory instrument like a microscope or telescope, except this one is inside of you instead of outside of you.

People become concerned with being more humble than other people.

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

To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it.

Here's an example: someone says, "Master, please hand me the knife," and he hands them the knife, blade first. "Please give me the other end," he says. And the master replies, "What would you do with the other end?" This is answering an everyday matter in terms of the metaphysical. When the question is, "Master, what is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?" Then he replies, "There is enough breeze in this fan to keep me cool." That is answering the metaphysical in terms of the everyday, and that is, more or less, the principle zen works on. The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.

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

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

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

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

Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world — a place where they are one.

Your soul isn't in your body; your body is in your soul!

Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home.

There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.

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

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.

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

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.

As the fish doesn't know water, people are ignorant of space. Consciousness is concerned only with changing and varying details; it ignores constants-especially constant backgrounds. Thus only very exceptional people are aware of what is basic to everything.

... preliminary accounting, banking and surveying (known as arithmetic, algebra and geometry).

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

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

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.

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

The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.

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

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

By going out of your mind, you come to your senses

The police have enough work to keep them busy regulating automobile traffic, preventing robberies and crimes of violence and helping lost children and little old ladies find their way home. As long as the police confine themselves to such activities they are respected friends of the public. But as soon as they begin inquiring into people's private morals, they become nothing more than armed clergymen.

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.

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

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.

When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there...You're looking at you..

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

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

We live in a culture where it has been rubbed into us in every conceivable way that to die is a terrible thing. And that is a tremendous disease from which our culture in particular suffers.

It's so important to consider this question: What do I desire?

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

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

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

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.

For if you know what you want, and will be content with it, you can be trusted. But if you do not know, your desires are limitless and no one can tell how to deal with you. Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.

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.

What is the next step, the practical application? —I will answer that the absolutely vital thing is to consolidate your understanding, to become capable of enjoyment, of living in the present, and of the discipline which this involves. Without this you have nothing to give.

Perhaps there is no other knowing than the mere competence of the act. If at the heart of one's being, there is no self to which one ought to be true, then sincerity is simply nerve; it lies in the unabashed vigor of the pretense. But pretense is only pretense when it is assumed that the act is not true to the agent. Find the agent.

The sound of the rain needs no translation. In music one doesn't make the end of the composition the point of the composition... Same way in dancing, you don't aim at one particular spot in the room... The whole point of dancing is the dance.

Different Chinese philosophers, writing probably in 5-4 centuries B.C., presented some major ideas and a way of life that are nowadays known under the name of Taoism, the way of correspondence between man and the tendency or the course of natural world.

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

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

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.

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.

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

If you belong to an in-group of good, or saved, or elite people, you can only know that you’re in because someone else is out. You cannot live on the right side of the tracks without there being a wrong side of the tracks, so you ought to be grateful to the outside for having the privilege of being on the inside.

To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.

If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.