Quotes from Alan Watts

For we have never actually understood the revolutionary sense beneath them – the incredible truth that what religion calls the vision of God is found in giving up any belief in the idea of God.

People sometimes fail to live because they are always preparing to live.

What keeps us from happiness is our inability to fully inhabit the present

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.

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

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

The trouble with many religions, accused of wishful thinking, is that they are not wishful enough. They show a deplorable lack of imagination.

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 only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.

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.

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

Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.

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.

When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing but things.

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

Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.

The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge. Just as a knife doesn't cut itself, fire doesn't burn itself, light doesn't illuminate itself. It's always an endless mystery to itself.

Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person.

A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.

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.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had.

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

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.