Alan Watts Quotes

Author Image

Alan Watts

Profession : Philosopher

Birth : January 6, 1915

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.

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

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.

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

Unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax.

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

Saints need sinners.

Alan Watts

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.

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

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.

Alan Watts

Faith is a state of openness or trust.

Alan Watts

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

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.

Alan Watts