Alan Watts Quotes

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

The problem is that the dieticians who actually supervise such “cooking” can indeed prove that it contains the proper amount of proteins, carbohydrates, minerals, and vitamins. But this is like judging the worth of music in terms of decibels and wave frequencies. “This record certified noninjurious to the human ear.

"The measuring of worth and success in the terms of time, and the insistent demand for assurances of a promising future, make it impossible to live freely both in the present and in the "promising" future when it arrives. For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere."

[A] life full of goals and end-points is like trying to abate one's hunger by eating merely the two precise ends of a banana. The concrete reality of the banana is, on the contrary, all that lies between the two ends, the journey as it were[.] Furthermore, when the time and space between destinations are cut out, all destinations tend to become ever more similar.

If we can really understand what we're looking for — that safety is isolation, and what we do to ourselves when we look for it — we shall see that we do not want it at all.

Eyes and light arise mutually in the same way as yin and yang. The universe is not, therefore, composed of independent things, that is: as human thought ordinarily fragments it: but the universe disposes itself as things. It is one body, one field, whose parts give rise to each other as inseparably as fronts and backs, but in an endlessly complex and interconnected maze.

and religion now seem to me to be meaningless, without even attaining the charm of deliberate nonsense; and this is even, and perhaps especially, true of the harangues of logical analysts and scientific empiricists against poets and metaphysicians.

only doubtful truths need defense.

hurry, and all that it involves, is fatal.

When someone says, “Time to stop now!” he is in a panic because he has had nothing to eat yet, and wants more and more time to go on eating money, ever hopeful of satisfaction around the corner.

Although the rhythm of the waves beats a kind of time, it is not clock or calendar time. It has no urgency. It happens to be timeless time. It harmonizes with our very breathing. It does not count our days. Its pulse is not in the stingy spirit of measuring, it is the breathing of eternity.

Kindly let me help you or you will drown said the monkey putting the fish safely up a tree.

We must go to the roots of a problem and not invest too much energy fiddling with the symptoms. We shall never get whites and blacks, or Orientals and Occidentals, to unite by trying to tie the different branches of the human tree together with string. Attention must instead be shifted to the stem and the root, where, under the surface, we are one. It will take much less time.

When it comes down to it, government is simply an abandonment of responsibility on the assumption that there are people, other than ourselves, who really know how to manage things. But the government, run ostensibly for the good of the people, becomes a self-serving corporation. To keep things under control it proliferates laws of ever-increasing complexity and unintelligibility, and hinders productive work by demanding so much accounting on paper that the record of what has been done becomes more important than what has actually been done. The Taoist moral is that people who mistrust themselves and one another are doomed.

Trust in human nature is acceptance of the good-and-bad of it, and it is hard to trust those who do not admit their own weakness.