Quotes By Alan Watts

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

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

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.

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

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

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Saints need sinners.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.