Quotes from Alan Watts

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

I owe my solitude to other people.

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.

Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.

In Zen, poverty is voluntary, and considered not really as poverty so much as simplicity, freedom, unclutteredness.

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

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

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

Faith is a state of openness or trust.

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

If you can't meditate in a boiler room, you can't meditate.

In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.

If you really want to spend some years in a Japanese monastery, there is no earthly reason why you shouldn't. Or if you want to spend your time hopping freight cars and digging Charlie Parker, it's a free country.

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.

And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.

No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.