Quotes By Alan Watts

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I owe my solitude to other people.

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.

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