Quotes By Alan Watts

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.