Quotes By Alan Watts

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.

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.

I owe my solitude to other people.

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.

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

We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.

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

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

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.

Faith is a state of openness or trust.

Saints need sinners.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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