Quotes from Alan Watts

But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.

The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.

Religion is not a department of life it is something that enters into the whole of it.

The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.

But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.

No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.

You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.

In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.

But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.

But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies.

Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal, for the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever….

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.

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

The more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love.

There is always something taboo, something repressed, un-admitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion.

There will always be suffering. But we must not suffer over the suffering.

This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.

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.

We are not clear as to the role in life of these chemicals; nor are we clear as to the role of the physician. You know, of course, that in ancient times there was no clear distinction between priest and physician.

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.