Alan Watts Quotes

“It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.”

“We know that from time to time there arise among human beings people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.”

“The hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests.”

“The point is seeing that THIS - the immediate, everyday and present experience - is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe. I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter.”

“You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.”

“You, yourself, are the eternal energy which appears as this Universe. You didn't come into this world; you came out of it. Like a wave from the ocean.”

“There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again.”

“When you really understand that you are what you see and know, you do not run around the countryside thinking, "I am all this!" There is simply all this.”

“I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.”

“All I'm saying is that minerals are just a rudimentary form of consciousness whereas the other people are saying that consciousness is a complicated form of minerals.”

“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.”

“Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible.”

“Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain; the most complicated thing in the world, which you yourself grew...without even thinking about it.”

“The question "What shall we do about it?" is only asked by those who do not understand the problem. If a problem can be solved at all, to understand it and to know what to do about it are the same thing. On the other hand, doing something about a problem which you do not understand is like trying to clear away darkness by thrusting it aside with your hands. When light is brought, the darkness vanishes at once.”

“Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we're not alone.”

“No one's mouth is big enough to utter the whole thing.”

“We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.”

“Do you see yourself as a victim of the world, or do you see yourself as the world?”

“Duality is always secretly unity.”

“Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.”

“Once you've learned to think you can't stop. And an enormous number of people devote their lives to keeping their minds busy and feel extremely uncomfortable with silence.”

“Nothing is more creative than death, since it has the whole secret of life. It means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that 'I' cannot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. When a man knows this, he lives for the first time in his life. By holding his breath, he loses it. By letting go he finds it.”

“Time is a social institution and not a physical reality. There is no such thing as time in the natural world - the world of stars and waters, clouds, mountains and living organisms. There is such a thing as rhythm - rhythm of tides, rhythm of biological processes... There is rhythm and there is motion. Time is a way of measuring motion.”

“... nets, grids, and other types of calculus.”

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