Quotes from Alan W. Watts

The source of all light is in the eye.

You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.

Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.

The menu is not the meal.

Philosophers, for example, often fail to recognize that their remarks about the universe apply also to themselves and their remarks. If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so.

It is both dangerous and absurd for our world to be a group of communions mutually excommunicate.

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.

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.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead.

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.

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.

If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed

Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated

When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of … Nothing is left but to love.

Discord on one level is harmony on another

Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.

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.

The brush must draw by itself. This cannot happen if one does not practice constantly. But neither can it happen if one makes an effort.

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.