Quotes by Alan Watts

“Carried to its final extreme, the logical end of this type of reaction to life is suicide. The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead”

“Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.”

“In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.”

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

“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.”

“But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.”

“Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”

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

“But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.”

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

“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 anyt...”

“The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because...”

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

“Faith is a state of openness or trust.”

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

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

“Buddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent... this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suf...”

“Zen is a way of liberation concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous but what is.”

“At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die but do not seem to make a "problem" of it.”

“If we live we live if we die we die if we suffer we suffer if we are terrified we are terrified. There is no problem about it.”