Alan Watts Quotes

Reality in itself is neither permanent nor impermanent; it cannot be categorized. But when one tries to hold on to it, change is everywhere apparent, since, like one's own shadow, the faster one pursues it, the faster it flees.

Man is not to be an intellectual porcupine meeting his environment with a surface of spikes. Man meets the world outside with a soft skin, with a delicate eyeball and eardrum, and finds communion with it through a warm, melting, vaguely defined and caressing touch whereby the world is not set at a distance like an enemy to be shot, but embraced to become one flesh, like a beloved wife.

Consequently our age is one of frustration, anxiety, agitation, and addiction to “dope.” Somehow we must grab what we can while we can, and drown out the realization that the whole thing is futile and meaningless. This “dope” we call our high standard of living, a violent and complex stimulation of the senses, which makes them progressively less sensitive and thus in need of yet more violent stimulation. We crave distraction — a panorama of sights, sounds, thrills, and titillations into which as much as possible must be crowded in the shortest possible time.

To go anywhere in philosophy, other than back and forth, round and round, one must have a keen sense of correlative vision. This is a technical term for a thorough understanding of the Game of Black-and-White, whereby 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 a continuum of ultimate goo, is the metaphysical unity underlying the world.

Man makes God in his own image, and as he comes to a clearer and more intelligible view of his own image - changing it in the process - he comes to a more intelligible view of God.

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

It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd — uncanny and highly improbable.

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.

He who thinks that God is not comprehended, by him God is comprehended; but he who thinks that God is comprehended knows him not. God is unknown to those who know him, and is known to those who do not know him at all.

Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree. To manifest individuality, every branch must have a sensitive connection with the tree, just as our independently moving and differentiated fingers must have a sensitive connection with the whole body. The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation. The head and the feet are different, but not separate, and though man is not connected to the universe by exactly the same physical relation as branch to tree or feet to head, he is nonetheless connected—and by physical relations of fascinating complexity. The death of the individual is not disconnection but simply withdrawal. The corpse is like a footprint or an echo—the dissolving trace of something which the Self has ceased to do.

Under the wide and starry sky Dig me a grave and let me lie; Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will.

the future is a concept — it doesn’t exist There is no such thing as tomorrow There never will be because time is always now. That’s one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now.

The point is not that one stops choosing, but that one chooses in the knowledge that there is really no choice. [...]
It is simply that in a universe of relativity, all choosing, all taking of sides, is playful. But this is not that one feels no urgency. To know the relativity of light and darkness is not to be able to gaze unblinkingly into the sun; to know the relativity of up and down is not to be able to fall upward. To feel urgency without compulsion is the seemingly paradoxical way of describing what it is like for a feeling to arise spontaneously without its happening to a feeler.

Death is the unknown in which all of us lived before birth.

Part of man’s frustration is that he has become accustomed to expect language and thought to offer explanations which they cannot give. To want life to be “intelligible” in this sense is to want it to be something other than life. It is to prefer a motion-picture film to a real, running man. To feel that life is meaningless unless “I” can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch.