Alan Watts Quotes

240 Sourced Quotes

Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world — a place where they are one.

Alan Watts
Preliminary accounting, banking and surveying (known as arithmetic, algebra and geometry).

Alan Watts
We are the eyes of the cosmos. So that in a way, when you look deeply into somebody's eyes, you are looking deeply into yourself, and the other person is looking deeply into the same self, which many-eyed, as the mask of Vishnu is many-faced, is looking out everywhere, one energy playing myriads of different parts.

Alan Watts
To perceive that form reveals the void, and to see that the void reveals form, is the secret for the overcoming of death. To the extent that one is unaware of space, one is unaware of one's own eternity — it's the same thing!

Alan Watts
The idea of the Universe being ruled by that marvelous old gentleman, is no longer plausible. It isn't that anybody has disproved it, but it just somehow doesn't go with the vast infinitude of the Universe.

Alan Watts
When you really understand that you are
what you see and know, you do not run around
the countryside thinking, "I am all this!"
There is simply all this...

Alan Watts
Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars.

Alan Watts
Mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.

Alan Watts
To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely one with this universe.

Alan Watts
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.

Alan Watts
The life of Zen begins, therefore, in a disillusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really exist the good without the bad, the gratification of a self which is no more than an idea, and the morrow which never comes.

Alan Watts
The natural world seems a marvel of complexity, requiring a vastly intricate intelligence to create and govern it, just because we have represented it to ourselves in the clumsy "notation" of thought.

Alan Watts
Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person.

Alan Watts
So many people of wealth understand much more about making and saving money than about using and enjoying it. They fail to live because they are always preparing to live.

Alan Watts
Although profoundly "inconsequential," the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied it lends an unmistakable quality to the work.

Alan Watts
For a decision-the freest of my actions just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.

Alan Watts
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.

Alan Watts
I knew of a physicist at the University of Chicago who was rather crazy like some scientists, and the idea of the insolidity, the instability of the physical world impressed him so much that he used to go around in enormous padded slippers for fear he should fall through the floor.

Alan Watts
Perhaps one of the subordinate reasons why sex is a matter for laughter is that there is something ridiculous in "doing" it with set purpose and deliberation...

Alan Watts
In Hindu philosophy the whole creation is regarded as the Vishnu Lila, the play of Vishnu. Lila means dance or play. Also in Hindu philosophy, they call the world illusion; and in Latin the root of the word illusion is ludere, to play.

Alan Watts
For thousands of years human history has been a magnificently futile conflict, a wonderfully staged panorama of triumphs and tragedies based on the resolute taboo against admitting that black goes with white.

Alan Watts
To remain caught up in ideas and words about Zen is, as the old masters say, to stink of Zen.

Alan Watts
Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.

Alan Watts
What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born.

Alan Watts
The hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests.

Alan Watts
The question "What shall we do about it?" is only asked by those who do not understand the problem. If a problem can be solved at all, to understand it and to know what to do about it are the same thing. On the other hand, doing something about a problem which you do not understand is like trying to clear away darkness by thrusting it aside with your hands. When light is brought, the darkness vanishes at once.

Alan Watts
The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is

Alan Watts
The habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism: to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns.

Alan Watts
Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.

Alan Watts
To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam.

Alan Watts