A collection of quotes and thoughts by Alan Watts on love, dream, truth, universe, real, travel, dance, change, plunge, sayings, trust, faith, focus, ego and future.
Alan Watts was a sagacious British philosopher, speaker, and writer. He is best remembered as decipherer and communicator of Eastern philosophy for the Western audience. In 1938, he pursued Zen training. He received his master’s degree in theology from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. In 1945, he became an Episcopal priest, but left the ministry after 5 years and joined the faculty of ‘American Academy of Asian Studies’ in California. He has expressed his thoughts, opinions, and views on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion in more than 25 articles and books. In 1957, he introduced the then youth culture to ‘The Way of Zen’ that became the first top-selling book on Buddhism. We have rounded some inspiring, and thought-provoking quotes and sayings by Alan Watts, which have been curated from his recorded talks, lectures, writings, books, thoughts, speeches, works, and life. Zoom through the motivating quotes and thoughts by Alan Watts.
Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.
Alan Watts
Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.
And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment.
Alan Watts
But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.
The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.
We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.
Alan Watts
The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens.
A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
Alan Watts
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.
So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.
Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it's just doing it.
Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
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 anything less than a god.
No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.
Alan Watts
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.
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.
Alan Watts
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
Alan Watts
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.
