Quotes By Alan Watts

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.