Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

English Italiano Polski עברית Français Português فارسی Español 中文 Русский Deutsch العربية हिन्दी 日本語 Ελληνικά Latina

Alan Watts

97 quotes

“Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Way of Zen, Pt. 2, Ch. 2 (1957)
“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Life magazine (21 April 1961)
“I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Two Hands of God : The Myths of Polarity (1963), p. 29
“For several years I have referred to this, hitherto, rare and inaccessible work as the I-told-you-so-book, because it has often been implied that I have invented my explanations of Buddhism out of thin air, thus falsifying its authentic teachings... Yet, despite the occultist flavor of its title, The Secret Oral Teachings in the Tibetan Buddhist Sects is the most direct, no-nonsense, and down-to-earth explanation of Mahayana Buddhism which has thus far been written.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Watts' Foreward to The Secret Oral Teachings in the Tibetan Buddhist Sects (1964)], by Alexandra David Neel
“It is especially important for Westerners to understand that high lamas, Zen masters, and Hindu gurus in the discipline of yoga are human beings, not supermen. We must not put them, as we have put Jesus Christ, on pedestals of reverence so high that we automatically exclude ourselves from their states of consciousness.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Foreward to The Secret Oral Teachings in the Tibetan Buddhist Sects (1964)], by Alexandra David Neel
“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.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Essence of Alan Watts (1977)
“This is the real secret of life—to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Essence of Alan Watts (1977)
“So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you're all that, only you're pretending you're not. And it's perfectly OK to pretend you're not, to be perfectly convinced, because this is the whole notion of drama.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Nature of Consciousness; also published as What Is Reality? (1989)
“Camus said there is only really one serious philosophical question, which is whether or not to commit suicide. I think there are four or five serious philosophical questions: The first one is: Who started it? The second is: Are we going to make it? The third is: Where are we going to put it? The fourth is: Who's going to clean up? And the fifth: Is it serious?”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Out Of Your Mind (2004), Audio lecture 1: The Nature of Consciousness: A Game That's Worth The Candle
“Religion is always falling apart.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is obviously a place in life for a religious attitude for awe and astonishment at existence. That is also a basis for respect for existence. We don't have much of it in this culture, even though we call it materialistic. In this culture we call materialistic, today we are of course bent on the total destruction of material and its conversion into junk and poisonous gases. This is of course not a materialistic culture because it has no respect for material. And respect is in turn based on wonder.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word "water" is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am amazed that Congressmen can pass a bill imposing severe penalties on anyone who burns the American flag, whereas they are responsible for burning that for which the flag stands: the United States as a territory, as a people, and as a biological manifestation. That is an example of our perennial confusion of symbols with realities.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now, you see, if you understand what I'm saying, with your intelligence, and then take the next step and say "But I understood it now, but I didn't feel it." Then, next I raise the question: Why do you want to feel it? You say: "I want something more", because that's again that spiritual greed. And you could only say that because you didn't understand it.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The pity of all this is, you know, a man like that [Sri Ramakrishna] has to have disciples, or no one would ever hear about him. But somehow, as the generations pass, the flame dies out. And eventually the disciples kill him. I wish that there was a way of putting a time-bomb into scriptures and records — not a time-bomb, but some kind of invisible ink, so that all scriptures would un-print themselves about fifty years after the master's death. And just dissolve.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Doctors try to get rid of their patients — clergymen try to get them hooked on the medicine so that they will become addicts to the church.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The basic problem is to understand that there are no such things as things; that is to say separate things, separate events. That is only a way of talking. What do you mean by a thing? A thing is a noun. A noun isn't a part of nature it's a part of speech. There are no nouns in the physical world. There are no separate things in the physical world either.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Watts on Wiggles Waves, used in the Cosmosis track No Such Thing (2007).
“Now I'm sure that most of you know the old story about the astronaut, who went far out into space, and was asked on his return whether he'd been to heaven and seen God. And he said: "Yes". And so they said to him: "Well, what about God?" And he said: "She's Black".”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It must be obvious... that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Running away from fear is fear; fighting pain is pain; trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it. It is to be able to use it as an instrument instead of being used by it.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was a basic Confucian principle that "it is man who makes truth great, not truth which makes man great." For this reason, "humanness" or "human-heartedness" (jen) was always felt to be superior to "righteousness" (i), since man himself is greater than any idea which he may invent. There are times when men's passions are much more trustworthy than their principles.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If Christianity is wine and Islam coffee, Buddhism is most certainly tea.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Buddhism ... is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or “loyal opposition” to the culture in which it is involved.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The psychotherapist ... tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to be in the world (of social convention) but not of the world.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Psychotherapists ... are dealing with people whose distress arises from what may be termed maya, to use the Hindu-Buddhist word whose exact meaning is not merely 'illusion' but the entire world-conception of a culture, considered as illusion in the strict etymological sense of a play (Latin, ludere). The aim of a way of liberation is not the destruction of maya but seeing it for what it is, or seeing through it. Play is not to be taken seriously, or, in other words, ideas of the world and of oneself which are social conventions and institutions are not to be confused with reality.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique. He is universal by virtue of the inseparability of his organism from the cosmos. He is unique in that he is just this organism and not any stereotype of role, class, or identity assumed for the convenience of social communication.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our trouble is that we have ignored and thus feel insecure in the enormous spectrum of love which lies between rather formal friendship and genital sexuality, and thus are always afraid that once we overstep the bounds of formal friendship we must slide inevitably to the extreme of sexual promiscuity.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East — in particular the central and germinal Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. This hallucination underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man's natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction. We are therefore in urgent need of a sense of our own existence which is in accord with the physical facts and which overcomes our feeling of alienation from the universe”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is an urgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained—though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Listen intently to a voice singing without words. It may charm you into crying, force you to dance, fill you with rage, or make you jump for joy. You can't tell where the music ends and the emotions begin, for the whole thing is a kind of music—the voice playing on your nerves as the breath plays on a flute. All experience is just that, except that its music has many more dimensions than sound. It vibrates in the dimensions of sight, touch, taste, and smell, and in the intellectual dimension of symbols and words—all evoking and playing upon each other.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wouldn't it be as farfetched to call birth the cause of death as to call the cat's head the cause of the tail? Lifting the neck of a bottle implies lifting the bottom as well, for the "two parts" come up at the same time. If I pick up an accordion by one end, the other will follow a little later, but the principle is the same. Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time as much as patterns in space.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sex is no longer a serious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more about it than adults.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wonder is not a disease. 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 (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world is in an extremely dangerous situation, and serious diseases often require the risk of a dangerous cure — like the Pasteur serum for rabies.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time — a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment... only to vanish forever.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We accepted a definition of ourselves which confined the self to the source and to the limitations of conscious attention. This definition is miserably insufficient, for in fact we know how to grow brains and eyes, ears and fingers, hearts and bones, in just the same way that we know how to walk and breathe, talk and think—only we can't put it into words. Words are too slow and too clumsy for describing such things, and conscious attention is too narrow for keeping track of all their details.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One sees that all explicit opposites are implicit allies—correlative in the sense that they "gowith" each other and cannot exist apart. This, rather than any miasmic absorption of differences into acontinuum of ultimate goo, is the metaphysical unity underlying the world. For this unity is not mere one-ness as opposed to multiplicity, since these two terms are themselves polar. The unity, or inseparability, of one and many is therefore referred to in Vedanta philosophy as "nonduality" (advaita) to distinguish it from simple uniformity.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to "get culture" or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Living, loving, being natural or sincere—all these are spontaneous forms of behavior: they happen "of themselves" like digesting food or growing hair. As soon as they are forced they acquire that unnatural, contrived, and phony atmosphere which everyone deplores—weak and scentless like forced flowers and tasteless like forced fruit. 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 (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have always done things in my own way, which is at once the way that comes naturally to me, that is honest, sincere, genuine, and unforced; but also perverse, although you must remember that this word means per (through) verse (poetry), out-of-the-way and wayward, which is surely towards the way, and that to be queer—to "follow your own weird"—is wholeheartedly to accept your karma, or fate, or destiny, and thus to be odd in the service of God, "whose service," as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer declares, "is perfect freedom.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source