Alan Watts Way Quotations

Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.

Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way...

Western religions are more concerned with behavior, doctrine, and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and our world.

When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was.

Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.

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.

To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely one with this universe.

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.

There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it.

Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.

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.

The best way to convince someone is by making him realize that what you speak came from his own mind.

There is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to "get culture" or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost.

We live in a culture where it has been rubbed into us in every conceivable way that to die is a terrible thing. And that is a tremendous disease from which our culture in particular suffers.

Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home.