Quotes By Alan Watts

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.

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.

Saints need sinners.

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.

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

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.

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.