Alan Watts
If you want to stay in a state of illusion, stay in it. But you can always wake up.Collection: Wake Up
Think about a piece of music - some great symphony - we don't expect it to get better as it develops, or that its whole purpose is to reach the final crescendo. The joy is found in listening to the music in each moment.Collection: Thinking
I can only think seriously of trying to live up to an ideal, to improve myself, if I am split in two pieces. There must be a good “I” who is going to improve the bad “me.” “I,” who has the best intentions, will go to work on wayward “me,” and the tussle between the two will very much stress the difference between them. Consequently “I” will feel more separate than ever, and so merely increase the lonely and cut-off feelings which make “me” behave so badly.Collection: Lonely
The trouble with many religions, accused of wishful thinking, is that they are not wishful enough. They show a deplorable lack of imagination.Collection: Thinking
Substances like LSD, which give away a secret about the nature of the social game - the human game and what underlies it - are potentially dangerous, of course, like any good thing is. Electricity is dangerous, fire is dangerous, cars are dangerous, planes are dangerous, but not so dangerous as driving on the freeway. The only way to handle danger is to face it. If you start getting frightened of it, then you make it worse. Because you project onto it all kinds of bogeys and threats which don't exist in it at all.Collection: Fire
We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.Collection: Tree
Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.Collection: Inspirational
What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.Collection: Inspiring
Everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality.Collection: Reality
People become concerned with being more humble than other people.Collection: Humble
There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied.Collection: Life
As the fish doesn't know water, people are ignorant of space. Consciousness is concerned only with changing and varying details; it ignores constants-especially constant backgrounds. Thus only very exceptional people are aware of what is basic to everything.Collection: Space
And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plowshares into swordsCollection: Hands
We are all as much extraordinary phenomena of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars and the form of a galaxy.Collection: Running
A holy person is someone who is whole; who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites.Collection: Opposites
To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely one with this universe.Collection: God
A less 'brainy-culture' would learn to synchronise its body rhythms rather than its clocks.Collection: Culture
A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.Collection: People
Everybody is I, you all know you are you. And wheresoever's beings exist throughout all galaxies it doesn't any difference. You are all of them, and when they come into being that's you coming into being, you know that very well. Only you don't have to remember the past in the same way you don't have to think about how you work your thyroid gland. You don't have to know how to shine the sun, you just do it, like you breathe. Doesn't it really astonish you that you are this fantastically complex thing, and that you're doing all of this and you never had any education on how to do it.Collection: Past
If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.Collection: Black
If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzedCollection: Trust Yourself
Black implies white self implies otherCollection: Self
When you really understand that you are what you see and know, you do not run around the countryside thinking, "I am all this!" There is simply all this.Collection: Running
The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually “grasp” reality.Collection: Reality
We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision. But if a decision itself were voluntary every decision would have to be preceded by a decision to decide - An infinite regression which fortunately does not occur. Oddly enough, if we had to decide to decide, we would not be free to decideCollection: Decision
Lack of love for the vegetative, subtle, cthonic, pagan, and sexy aspect of the world means death.Collection: Death
You can't figure out the Universe, especially if you're using figures to figure it.Collection: School
Sexual love is a troubled and problematic relationship in cultures where there is a strong sense of man's separation from nature, especially when the realm of nature is felt to be inferior or contaminated with evil.Collection: Strong
Spiritual awakening is the difficult process whereby the increasing realisation that everything is as wrong as it can be flips suddenly into the realisation that everything is as right is it can be. Or better, everything is as It as it can be.Collection: Spiritual
For a decision-the freest of my actions just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.Collection: Bird
It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.Collection: Language
If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death - or shall I say, death implies life - you can conceive yourself. Not conceive, but feel yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as someone here on sufferance, on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.Collection: Self
How did you know you're alive, unless you'd once been dead?Collection: Alive
For the perfect accomplishment of any art, you must get this feeling of the eternal present into your bones - for it is the secret of proper timing. No rush. No dawdle. Just the sense of flowing with the course of events in the same way that you dance to music, neither trying to outpace it nor lagging behind. Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.Collection: Art
Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body, he 'has' a body. Instead of living and loving he 'has' instincts for survival and copulation.Collection: Cutting
The further and further we look out with our telescopes and the further and further we look in with our microscopes, the larger and larger and smaller and smaller the universe becomes in order to escape the investigation because we are the universe looking at itself.Collection: Order
What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.Collection: Safety
In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.Collection: World
Of what use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies? Yet just because it has no use, it has a use - which may sound like a paradox, but is not. What, for instance, is the use of playing music? If you play to make money, to outdo some other artist, to be a person of culture, or to improve your mind, you are not really playing - for your mind is not on the music. You don't swing. When you come to think of it, playing or listening to music is a pure luxury, an addiction, a waste of valuable time and money for nothing more than making elaborate patterns of sound.Collection: Thinking
Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree.Collection: Inspiring
We are seeing, then, that our experience is altogether momentary. From one point of view, each moment is so elusive and so brief that we cannot even think about it before it has gone. From another point of view, this moment is always here, since we know no other moment than the present moment. It is always dying, always becoming past more rapidly than imagination can conceive. Yet at the same time it is always being born, always new, emerging just as rapidly from that complete unknown we call the future. Thinking about it almost makes you breathless.Collection: Time
I was talking to a Zen master the other day and he said, "You shall be my disciple."I looked at him and said, "Who was Buddha's teacher?" He looked at me in a very odd way for a moment and then he burst into laughter and handed me a piece of clover.Collection: Spiritual
You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.Collection: Inspiring
The life of Zen begins, therefore, in a disillusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really exist the good without the bad, the gratification of a self which is no more than an idea, and the morrow which never comes.Collection: Self
If you can't meditate in a boiler room, you can't meditate.Collection: Inspiration
To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam.Collection: Silence
That's a waste of time. If you really understand Zen... you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because... the sound of the rain needs no translation.Collection: Rain
Nothing fails like success—because the self-imposed task of our society and all its members is a contradiction: to force things to happen which are acceptable only when they happen without force.Collection: Self
Duality is always secretly unity.Collection: Truth