Quotes by Alan W. Watts

“Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of o...”

“So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.”

“Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Th...”

“And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light. I return in every baby born.”

“As is so often the way, what we have suppressed and overlooked issomething startlingly obvious. The difficulty is that it is so obvious andbasic that one can hardly find the words for it. The Germa...”

“If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself not as a stranger i...”

“And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up...”

“We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we're in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back form the present. That now is the creat...”

“To notice is to select, toregard some bits of perception, or some features of the world, as morenoteworthy, more significant, than others. To these we attend, and therest we ignorefor which reason ...”

“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 ...”

“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 s...”

“To look at life without words is not to lose the ability to form words- to think, remember, and plan. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one c...”

“I owe my solitude to other people.”

“We fail so easily to see the difference between fear of the unknown and respect for the unknown, thinking that those who do not hasten in with bright lights and knives are deterred by a holy and su...”

“You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.”

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

“Here's an example: someone says, "Master, please hand me the knife," and he hands them the knife, blade first. "Please give me the other end," he says. And the master replies, "What would you do wi...”

“If we get rid of all wishful thinking and dubious metaphysical speculations, we can hardly doubt that at a time not too distant each one of us will simply cease to be. It wont be like going into ...”

“For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.”

“For our radically misnamed materialistic civilization must above all cultivate the love of material, of earth, air, and water, of mountains and forests, of excellent food and imaginative housing an...”