Alan Watts Quotes (62 Quotes)

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

(At times), no one could tell whether he was in deep meditation or fast asleep.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The more we try to catch hold of the present moment the more elusive it becomes. It is like trying to clutch water in ones hands. The harder we grip, the more it slips through our fingers.

I owe my solitude to other people.

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

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.

We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible.

Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.

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.

We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.

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

Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.

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

No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve in quality as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing it is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.

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

This is the real secret of life - to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.

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

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.

Saints need sinners.

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

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

When your eyes are functioning well you don't see your eyes. If your eyes are imperfect you see spots in front of them. That means there are some lesions in the retina or wherever, and because your eyes aren't working properly, you feel them. In the same way, you don't hear your ears. If you have a ringing in your ears it means there's something wrong with your ears. Therefore, if you do feel yourself, there must be something wrong with you. Whatever you have, the sensation of I is like spots in front of your eyes - it means something's wrong with your functioning.

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

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

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

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

We could say that meditation doesn't have a reason or doesn't have a purpose. In this respect it's unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing. When we make music we don't do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.

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

The mind's the standard of the man.

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 one's mouth is big enough to utter the whole thing.

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.

Faith is a state of openness or trust.

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