Alan W. Watts
51 quotes
Biography
Alan Wilson Watts was a British and American writer, speaker, and self-styled "philosophical entertainer", known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience.
"We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society."
"Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun."
"This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play."
"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."
"You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself."
"The menu is not the meal."
"The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive."
"Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know."
"Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way."
"What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins"for real things."
"A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter."
"There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said."
"It is interesting that Hindus, when they speak of the creation of the universe do not call it the work of God, they call it the play of God, the Vishnu lila, lila meaning play. And they look upon the whole manifestation of all the universes as a play, as a sport, as a kind of dance — lila perhaps being somewhat related to our word lilt"
"In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean."
"Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated"
"Philosophers, for example, often fail to recognize that their remarks about the universe apply also to themselves and their remarks. If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so."
"when somebody plays music, you listen. you just follow those sounds, and eventually you understand the music. the point can't be explained in words because music is not words, but after listening for a while, you understand the point of it, and that point is the music itself. in exactly the same way, you can listen to all experiences."
"You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up."
"Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together."
"I have always thought that all philosophical debates are ultimately between the partisans of structure and the partisans of "goo."
"The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion."
"If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid."
"Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior."
"Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone."
"Discord on one level is harmony on another"