Alan Watts Quotes
A British philosopher, writer, speaker, who held both a master's degree in theology and a doctorate of divinity.
(1915 - 1973)
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A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
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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.
[Bodies]
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And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.
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At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but do not seem to make a "problem" of it.
[Simplicity]
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Buddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent... this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering.
[Acceptance]
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Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.
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But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.
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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.
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But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
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But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
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But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.
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But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.
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Faith is a state of openness or trust.
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Faith is, above all, openness; an act of trust in the unknown.
[Spirituality]
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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.
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I have realized that the past and the future are real illusions, that they exist only in the present, which is what there is and all that there is.
[The Present]
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I owe my solitude to other people.
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If we live, we live; if we die, we die; if we suffer, we suffer; if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it.
[Simplicity]
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If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.
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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.
[America]
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