Quotes by Alan W. Watts

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

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

“The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it with the wo...”

“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 a...”

“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.”

“Faith is a state of openness or trust.To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You dont grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do you will become stiff and tight in...”

“People become concerned with being more humble than other people.”

“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.”

“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative pas...”

“When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of Nothing is left but to love.”

“The source of all light is in the eye.”

“If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed”

“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.”

“There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.”

“Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an ins...”

“To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead.”

“We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a separate center of feeling and acti...”

“You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.”

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of...”