Alan Watts Quotes

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Alan Watts

Profession : Philosopher

Birth : January 6, 1915

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.

Alan Watts

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.

Alan Watts

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.

Alan Watts

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.

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

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.

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

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.

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

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.

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

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.

Alan Watts

I owe my solitude to other people.

Alan Watts