Alan Watts
And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.Collection: People
When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there...You're looking at you.Collection: Eye
Chaos is always losing, but never defeatedCollection: Losing
Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it.Collection: Where You Are
We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can’t slow down enough to enjoy them when they come.Collection: Rushing
Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it.Collection: Looks
To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Ocean
The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security. On the other hand, the more we are forced to admit that we actually live in the real world, the more we feel ignorant, uncertain, and insecure about everything.Collection: Real
What we need to realize is that there can be, shall we say, a movement, a stirring among people, which can be organically designed instead of politically designed.Collection: People
Do you have any control over being conscious? Do you know how you will?Collection: Conscious
The Universe is the game of the self, which plays hide and seek forever and ever.Collection: Self
People often say to me, 'I understand what you are talking about intellectually, but I don't really feel it, I don't realize it,' and I am apt to reply, 'I wonder whether you do understand it intellectually, because if you did you would also feel it.'Collection: Talking
The animal tends to eat with his stomach, and the man with his brain. When the animal's stomach is full, he stops eating, but the man is never sure when to stop. When he has eaten as much as his belly can take, he still feels empty, he still feels an urge for further gratification.Collection: Animal
More and more we try to effect an adaptation to life by means of external gadgets, and attempt to solve our problems by conscious thinking rather than unconscious 'know-how'. This is much less to our advantage than we like to suppose.Collection: Life
One's life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If one is paranoid, the other is metanoid.Collection: Men
Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.Collection: Real
But nirvana is a radical transformation of how it feels to be alive: it feels as if everything were myself, or as if everything---including "my" thoughts and actions---were happening of itself. There are still efforts, choices, and decisions, but not the sense that "I make them"; they arise of themselves in relation to circumstances. This is therefore to feel life, not as an encounter between subject and object, but as a polarized field where the contest of opposites has become the play of opposites.Collection: Opposites
For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase—oddly enough—to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization.Collection: Intelligent
Buddhism ... is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or "loyal opposition" to the culture in which it is involved.Collection: Buddhism
You will begin to realize that if you contemplate long enough on the leaf of the flower, that it involves the whole universe.Collection: Flower
To perceive that form reveals the void, and to see that the void reveals form, is the secret for the overcoming of death. To the extent that one is unaware of space, one is unaware of one's own eternity — it's the same thing!Collection: Death
We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.Collection: Nature
If the earth is man's extended body, to be loved and respected as one's own body, those who do no greening of themselves will hardly bring about the greening of America. The idea of 'greening' involves color, flowering, freshness of spring, and, above all, respect for what is organic and vegetative as distinct from the mechanical and metallic.Collection: Friendship
We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible.Collection: Stars
We therefore work, not for the work's sake, but for money—and money is supposed to get us what we really want in our hours of leisure and play. In the United States even poor people have lots of money compared with the wretched and skinny millions of India, Africa, and China, while our middle andupper classes (or should we say "income groups") are as prosperous as princes. Yet, by and large, they have but slight taste for pleasure. Money alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy.Collection: Art
Although profoundly "inconsequential," the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied it lends an unmistakable quality to the work.Collection: Work
...mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.Collection: Together
However much I may be impressed by the difference between a star and the dark space around it, I must not forget that I can see the two only in relation to each other, and that this relation is inseparable.Collection: Stars
Your body does not eliminate poisons by knowing their names. To try to control fear or depression or boredom by calling them names is to resort to superstition of trust in curses and invocations. It is so easy to see why this does not work. Obviously, we try to know, name, and define fear in order to make it “objective,” that is, separate from “I.Collection: Order
Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.Collection: Attitude
At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but do not seem to make a "problem" of it.Collection: Animal
Courage is the goal of cowards.Collection: Goal
Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart.Collection: Heart
Everyone is the fabric and structure of existence.Collection: Fabric
Life and love generate effort but effort will not generate them.Collection: Life And Love
No one's mouth is big enough to utter the whole thing.Collection: Mouths
I want ... to consort with people whose emotions are not ... cold and standoffish.Collection: People
Faith...is letting go and trusting oneself to the unknown.Collection: Faith
When one speaks of awakening, it means de-hypnotizatio n; coming to your senses. But of course to do that, you have to go out of your mind.Collection: Mean
For every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree. To manifest individuality, every branch must have a sensitive connection with the tree, just as our independently moving and differentiated fingers must have a sensitive connection with the whole body. The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation.Collection: Moving
Thought is a means of concealing Truth.Collection: Mean
We are at the moment looking at space as something to be entered by the tremendous thrust of a rocket because that is the attitude of attacking the unknown. And that causes us not to realize that we are already on the most magnificently equipped spaceship, which could hardly be improved upon. It has got a source of temperature and energy just at the right distance from it. It's beautifully equipped with oxygen, with food supplies, with all kinds of delightful things to do while on the journey.... and it's traveling through space at a colossal speed... and it's called the planet Earth.Collection: Attitude
To feel that life is meaningless unless “I” can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch.Collection: Ego
If we are not totally blind, what we are seeking is already here. This is it.Collection: Blind
I am amazed that Congressmen can pass a bill imposing severe penalties on anyone who burns the American flag, whereas they are responsible for burning that for which the flag stands: the United States as a territory, as a people, and as a biological manifestation. That is an example of our perennial confusion of symbols with realities.Collection: Reality
If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.Collection: Letting Go
The Tao belongs neither to knowing nor not knowing. Knowing is false understanding; not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it's like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?Collection: Ignorance