Alan Watts

Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.

Every explicit duality is an implicit unity.

Truly great companies are built on ideals, not just deals.

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

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

No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.

Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home.

But to me nothing the negative the empty is exceedingly powerful.

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel for love is not ours to command.

There will always be suffering. But we must not suffer over the suffering.

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

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 to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.

The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.

We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.

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

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

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

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

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.

Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.

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.

If you insist on being determined by the past, that’s your game, but the fact of the matter is it all starts right now.

Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible.

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.

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.

Taoism is a way of liberation which never comes by means of revolution since it is notorious that most revolutions establish worse tyrannies than they destroy.

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

Duality is always secretly unity.

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.

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

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

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

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it move with it and join the dance.

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

Altough we all realize that monotony is boring, almost every form of industrial work- banking, accounting, mass-producing, service- is monotonous, and most people are paid for simply putting up with monotony

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

One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious and the same may be said of guilt.

Only those who can accept their own annihilation can have the courage to be true individuals.

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

Buddhas doctrine Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent... this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering.

Spiritual awakening is the difficult process whereby the increasing realisation that everything is as wrong as it can be flips suddenly into the realisation that everything is as right is it can be. Or better, everything is as It as it can be.

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.

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

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.

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

There's an interdependence between flowers and bees. Where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees, there are no flowers. They are really one organism. And so in the same way, everything in nature depends on everything else.

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

Faith is a state of openness or trust.

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.

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

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

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

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

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.

There is a deep, peaceful calm in the dawning of a new day.

The style of God venerated in the church mosque or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.

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

Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.

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.

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

Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever.

Saints need sinners.

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.

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.

I owe my solitude to other people.

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

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

If you can’t meditate in a boiler room, you can’t meditate.

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

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

Cows scream louder than carrots.

But Ill tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far far forest and get very quiet youll come to understand that youre connected with everything.

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