Quotes By Alan Watts

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Faith is a state of openness or trust.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I owe my solitude to other people.

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

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.

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.