Alan Watts Quotes

Wars based on principle are far more destructive… the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.

Saints need sinners.

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.

Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.

Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it’s just doing it.

Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.

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 they have no imagination.

The sound of the rain needs no translation.

All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head.

So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.

But to me nothing – the negative, the empty – is exceedingly powerful.

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.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had.