Quotes from Alan Watts

A paradox is only a truth standing on its head to attract attention.

Duality is always secretly unity.

Saints need sinners.

And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment.

Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.

...the whole universe is through and through the playing of love in every shade of the word's use, from animal lust to divine charity.

Life and love generate effort but effort will not generate them.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

I owe my solitude to other people.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

Buddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent... this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering.

We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.

If we live, we live; if we die, we die; if we suffer, we suffer; if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it.

At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but do not seem to make a "problem" of it.

A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with Reality, and lives in a world of illusion.

The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.

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

The mind's the standard of the man.

When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.

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

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.

Unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax.

The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.