Alan Watts's Quotes

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

Saints need sinners.

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

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

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

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

I owe my solitude to other people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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