Quotes By Alan Watts

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.