Alan W. Watts Quotes - Page 2

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.

Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.

You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.

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.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

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.

Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body, he 'has' a body. Instead of living and loving he 'has' instincts for survival and copulation.

The source of all light is in the eye.

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.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

The brush must draw by itself. This cannot happen if one does not practice constantly. But neither can it happen if one makes an effort.

The common mistake of the religious celibate has been to suppose that the highest spiritual life absolutely demands the renunciation of sexuality, as if the knowledge of God were an alternative to the knowledge of woman, or to any other form of experience.

The answer to the problem of suffering is not away from the problem but in it. The inevitability of pain will not be met by deadening sensitivity but by increasing it, by exploring and feeling out the manner in which the natural organism itself wants to react and which its innate wisdom has provided.

I owe my solitude to other people.

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