Alan Watts
Many people think that the Bible is the authentic word of God and they worship the Bible, making it an idol.Collection: Thinking
Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.Collection: Way
The real Zen of the old Chinese masters was wu-shih, or "no fuss."Collection: Real
The Highest to which people can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes them wonder, let them be content; nothing higher can it give them, and nothing further should they seek for behind it; there is the limit.Collection: People
Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.Collection: Eye
You can't get wet from the word 'water.'Collection: Water
Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.Collection: Moving
The destination of life is this eternal moment.Collection: Life
Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy and you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, ‘My goodness, I’ve just discovered that I’m God,’ they’ll laugh and say, ‘Oh, congratulations, at last you found out.Collection: Jesus
We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we're in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back from the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see it's like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that...Also, watch the flow of music. The melody as its expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence...you wait till later to find out what the sentence means...The present is always changing the past.Collection: Mean
You must not be afraid of playing wrong notes. Just forget it, play it wrong! But play!Collection: Play
When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.Collection: Unique
Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.Collection: Trying
The 'you' who you think you are does not exist.Collection: Thinking
For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, "Now, I've arrived!" Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.Collection: Contentment
As muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone, it could be argued that those who sit quietly and do nothing are making one of the best possible contributions to a world in turmoil.Collection: Freedom
Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.Collection: Enlightenment
The more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually killing what we love.Collection: Inspiring
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.Collection: Inspiring
Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.Collection: World
Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.Collection: Eye
Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment.Collection: Growing Up
It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.Collection: Acorns
Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.Collection: Laughter
Faith is, above all, openness; an act of trust in the unknown.Collection: Spirituality
Of course, you can’t force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flatiron. Water becomes clear and calm only when left alone.Collection: Water
If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.Collection: Happiness
Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.Collection: Past
We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.Collection: Journey
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.Collection: Acceptance
What keeps us from happiness is our inability to fully inhabit the presentCollection: Inability
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.Collection: Ocean
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.Collection: Inspiring
The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.Collection: Human Nature
And so when the essential idea of love is lost there comes talk of fidelity. Actually, the only possible basis for two beings, male and female, to relate to each other is to grant each other total freedom.Collection: Love Is
Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we're not alone.Collection: Secret
Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.Collection: Short Life
Do you see yourself as a victim of the world, or do you see yourself as the world?Collection: World
Your soul isn't in your body; your body is in your soul!Collection: Soul
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.Collection: Inspirational
Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.Collection: Inspiring
To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.Collection: Inspiring
The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.Collection: Sacred
We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of timeCollection: Culture
We usually don't look. We overlook.Collection: Spiritual
To go out of your mind at least once a day is tremendously important. By going out of your mind, you come to your senses.Collection: Spiritual
If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives we may forget altogether to live them.Collection: May
You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it.Collection: Meditation
The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation. The head and the feet are different, but not separate, and though man is not connected to the universe by exactly the same physical relation as branch to tree or feet to head, he is nonetheless connected - and by physical relations of fascinating complexity.Collection: Motivational