Quotes from Alan Watts

The destination of life is this eternal moment.

No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.

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

Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.

The Greek word for sinning means to 'miss the point;' The point is eternal life which is here and now.

Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.

That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality.

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

To go out of your mind at least once a day is tremendously important. By going out of your mind, you come to your senses.

Self-improvement is a dangerous form of vanity.

To be alive spiritually man must have union with God and must be conscious of it. Apart from this union his religious life will be an empty drudgery, a mere imitation of true spirituality.

The real you is not a puppet that life pushes around, the real deep down you is the whole universe.

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.

It is the seeker, who understands there is more than what meets the eye, who is not afraid and makes the choice to go into the unknown. The process of awaking has begun, the discovery is underway.

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

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.

Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars.

In life as well as in art Zen never wastes energy in stopping to explain; it only indicates.

To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.

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

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.

For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase—oddly enough—to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization.

No worthwhile life can be lived without risks, despite current American superstitions to the contrary.

It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.