Alan Watts Quotes - Page 8

Quotes about:

• Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.

  Alan Watts

  Motivational, Art, Animal

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.7, Souvenir Press

  50 Copy quote

• We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision. But if a decision itself were voluntary every decision would have to be preceded by a decision to decide - An infinite regression which fortunately does not occur. Oddly enough, if we had to decide to decide, we would not be free to decide

  Alan Watts

  Decision, Doe, Our Actions

  Alan Watts (1989). “The way of Zen”, Vintage

  12 Copy quote

• For the perfect accomplishment of any art, you must get this feeling of the eternal present into your bones - for it is the secret of proper timing. No rush. No dawdle. Just the sense of flowing with the course of events in the same way that you dance to music, neither trying to outpace it nor lagging behind. Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.

  Alan Watts

  Art, Accomplishment, Perfect

  Alan W. Watts (2010). “Does It Matter?: Essays on Man s Relation to Materiality”, p.32, New World Library

  13 Copy quote

• Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed will be far less destructive, because the aggressor will be careful not to destroy what he is fighting to capture. Reasonable - that is, human - men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life.

  Alan Watts

  War, Fighting, Simple

  "The Way of Zen".

  24 Copy quote

• Everybody should do in their lifetime, sometime, two things. One is to consider death...to observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up-never. That is a most gloomy thing for contemplation; it's like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative of creating life. You'll get wonderful things out of that.

  Alan Watts

  Sleep, Acceptance, Skeletons

  31 Copy quote

• For when you see that the universe cannot be distinguished from how you act upon it, there is neither fate nor free will, self nor other. There is simply one all-inclusive Happening, in which your personal sensation of being alive occurs in just the same way as the river flowing and the stars shining far out in space. There is no question of submitting or accepting or going with it, for what happens in and as you is no different from what happens as it.

  Alan Watts

  Stars, Fate, Self

  15 Copy quote

• What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born.

  Alan Watts

  Sleep, Wake Up, Gone

  17 Copy quote

• There is no coming toward it or going away from it; it is, and you are it.

  Alan Watts

  Going Away

  Alan Watts (2003). “Become what You are”, p.11, Shambhala Publications

  30 Copy quote

• Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith-in life, in other people, and in oneself-is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.

  Alan Watts

  Inspiring, Life And Love, Attitude

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.53, Souvenir Press

  20 Copy quote

• We think that the world is limited and explained by its past. We tend to think that what happened in the past determines what is going to happen next, and we do not see that it is exactly the other way around! What is always the source of the world is the present; the past doesn't explain a thing. The past trails behind the present like the wake of a ship and eventually disappears.

  Alan Watts

  Past, Thinking, World

  Alan Watts (2010). “What Is Zen?”, p.48, New World Library

  21 Copy quote

• Imagine a multidimensiona l spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image.

  Alan Watts

  Buddhist, Morning, Reflection

  30 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alan Watts

  Art, Thinking, Ideas

  12 Copy quote

• The further and further we look out with our telescopes and the further and further we look in with our microscopes, the larger and larger and smaller and smaller the universe becomes in order to escape the investigation because we are the universe looking at itself.

  Alan Watts

  Order, Looks, Telescopes

  9 Copy quote

• Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—-to the “conquest” of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.

  Alan Watts

  Intelligent, Technology, Men

  Alan W. Watts, Daniel Pinchbeck (2013). “The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness”, p.112, New World Library

  39 Copy quote

• Change is an illusion because we're always at the place where any future can take us.

  Alan Watts

  Illusion

  8 Copy quote

• The Art of Being: A state of wholeness in which the mind functions freely and easily, without the sensation of a second mind or ego standing over it with a club.

  Alan Watts

  Art, Ego, Mind

  18 Copy quote

• To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.

  Alan Watts

  Motivational, Play, Done

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.89, Souvenir Press

  8 Copy quote

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

  Alan Watts

  Language, Description, Hard

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.24, Souvenir Press

  6 Copy quote

• Everything is perpetually becoming new.

  Alan Watts

  Change, Becoming, Becoming New

  13 Copy quote

• To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.

  Alan Watts

  Inspiring, Conventions, Deceived

  Alan Watts (1989). “The way of Zen”, Vintage

  7 Copy quote

• What you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call "here and now," and you are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing... The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around. The real deep-down you is the whole universe.

  Alan Watts

  Real, Ocean, Puppets

  "Tao of Philosophy".

  24 Copy quote

• How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment - from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies - how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?

  Alan Watts

  Motivational, Eye, Jewels

  12 Copy quote

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

  Alan Watts

  Levels, Harmony, Discord

  9 Copy quote

• Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.

  Alan Watts

  Inspiring, Frustration, Trying

  Alan Watts (1951). “The Wisdom of Insecurity”, Vintage

  5 Copy quote

• A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.

  Alan Watts

  People, Intellectual, Philosopher

  Alan Watts (2011). “Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks: 1960-1969”, p.73, New World Library

  7 Copy quote

Page 8 of 20

First

← Prev

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin