Quotes by Alan Watts

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

“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.”

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

“I owe my solitude to other people.”

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

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

“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.”

“We could say that meditation doesnt have a reason or doesnt have a purpose. In this respect its unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing. When we make music we dont do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.”

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

“Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.”

“We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.”

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

“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.”

“That Was Zen; This Is Tao”

“The only Zen you find on tops of mountains is the Zen you bring there”

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

“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 its only money... they dont know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.”

Carried to its final extreme, the logical end of this type of reaction to life is suicide. The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead

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.

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