Thought-provoking Quotes by Alan Watts
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The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge. Just as a knife doesn't cut itself, fire doesn't burn itself, light doesn't illuminate itself. It's always an endless mystery to itself.

These people, as far as I can see, do not congregate in the notorious centers of the movement, like the North Beach in San Francisco or Greenwich Village, or Venice, California.

The truth is revealed by removing things that stand in its light, an art not unlike sculpture, in which the artist creates, not by building, but by hacking away.

A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with Reality, and lives in a world of illusion.

Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.

Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up.

The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.

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

To go out of your mind at least once a day is tremendously important. By going out of your mind, you come to your senses.

You are the universe experiencing itself.

We keep counting time. We have the sensation time is running out, and we bug ourselves with this. Time is nothing but an abstract measure of motion. We are living in an eternal now.

The only alternative to a shuddering paralysis is to leap into action regardless of the consequences.

Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.

The difficulty of describing things for Western ears is that people in a hurry cannot feel.

A certain amount of doing nothing, and stopping rushing around, would cool everything.

If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.

A life full of goals or endpoints is like trying to abate one's hunger by eating merely the two precise ends of a banana.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

To really do nothing, with perfection, is as difficult as doing everything.

We need, above all things, to slow down and get ourselves to amble through life instead of to rush through it.

The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing.

Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.

The relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.

When we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.

We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we're in.

When you're ready to wake up, you're going to wake up. And if you're not ready, you're going to stay pretending you're just poor little me.

The essential principle of business -- of occupation in the world -- is this: figure out some way in which you get paid for playing.

Buddha's doctrine: man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are impermanent.

To resist change, to try to cling to life, is like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.

Money is a way of measuring wealth but is not wealth in itself.

Inner emptiness is not a void to be filled with comforts; it is a window to be looked through.

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

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

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

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

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.

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.

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.

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

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

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

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.

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

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.

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.

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.

No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

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

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

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the 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.