Alan Watts
Philosophy is man’s expression of curiosity about everything and his attempt to make sense of the world primarily through his intellect.Collection: Philosophy
... preliminary accounting, banking and surveying (known as arithmetic, algebra and geometry).Collection: Banking
Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once.Collection: Thinking
The self-styled practical man of affairs who pooh-poohs philosophy as a lot of windy notions is himself a pragmatist or a positivist, and a bad one at that, since he has given no thought to his position.Collection: Business
These people, as far as I can see, do not congregate in the notorious centers of the movement, like the North Beach in San Francisco or Greenwich Village, or Venice, California.Collection: Beach
...for thousands of years human history has been a magnificently futile conflict, a wonderfully staged panorama of triumphs and tragedies based on the resolute taboo against admitting that black goes with white.Collection: Years
That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality.Collection: Strong
Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time as much as patterns in space.Collection: Inspiring
... nets, grids, and other types of calculus.Collection: Mathematics
Just what should a young man or woman know to be 'in the know'? Is there, in other words, some inside information, some special taboo, some real lowdown on life and existence that most parents and teachers either don't know or won't tell?Collection: Teacher
For there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other.Collection: Running
I too realize that the less I preach the more likely I am to be heard.Collection: Realizing
Zen is really extraordinarily simple as long as one doesn't try to be cute about it or beat around the bush! Zen is simply the sensation and the clear understanding ... that there is behind the multiplicity of events and creatures in this universe simply one energy -- and it appears as you, and everything is it. The practice of Zen is to understand that one energy so as to "feel it in your bones.Collection: Cute
How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment - from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies - how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?Collection: Motivational
A living body is not a fixed thing but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool: the shape alone is stable, for the substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other. We are particularly and temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream that enters us in the form of light, heat, air, water, milk, bread, fruit, beer, beef Stroganoff, caviar, and pate de foie gras. It goes out as gas and excrement - and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, war, poetry, and music. And philosophy.Collection: Baby
But we must not suffer over the suffering.Collection: Adversity
What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is an urgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained - though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is.Collection: Ocean
Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.Collection: Eye
Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.Collection: Jesus
This-the immediate, everyday, and present experience-is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.Collection: Everyday
We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.Collection: Art
Our view of reality is like a chart of the sea - the truer it is, the less likely we will become lost.Collection: Reality
It seems to be the special peculiarity of human beings that they reflect: they think about thinking and know that they know. This, like other feedback systems, may lead to vicious circles and confusions if improperly managed, but self-awareness makes human experience resonant. It imparts that simultaneous "echo" to all that we think and feel as the box of a violin reverberates with the sound of the strings. It gives depth and volume to what would otherwise be shallow and flat.Collection: Thinking
Zen... does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.Collection: Spiritual
What would you do if money was no object?Collection: Objects
Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.Collection: Life
You can't make love without art.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Art
There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.Collection: Life
To be alive spiritually man must have union with God and must be conscious of it. Apart from this union his religious life will be an empty drudgery, a mere imitation of true spirituality.Collection: Spiritual
The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.Collection: Inspiring
We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.Collection: Talking
Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.Collection: Reality
The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings, the past and the future are not as real, but rather more real than the present.Collection: Life
Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up.Collection: Meditation
Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.Collection: Inspirational
In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.Collection: Feelings
We have a strange anxiety in us; that if we don't interfere then it won't happen. Now that's the root of an enormous amount of trouble.Collection: Roots
Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.Collection: Secret
Change is an illusion because we're always at the place where any future can take us.Collection: Illusion
Basically, there is simply nothing to worry about, because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe.Collection: Worry
Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap.Collection: Intellectual
Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure.Collection: Art
The truth is revealed by removing things that stand in its light, an art not unlike sculpture, in which the artist creates, not by building, but by hacking away.Collection: Art
What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?Collection: Spending
There's an interdependence between flowers and bees. Where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees, there are no flowers. They are really one organism. And so in the same way, everything in nature depends on everything else.Collection: Flower
If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise; you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Stupid