Alan Watts quotes

“But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.”

— Alan Watts

“So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.”

— Alan Watts

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

— Alan Watts

“I owe my solitude to other people.”

— Alan Watts

“Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.”

— Alan Watts

“The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.”

— Alan Watts

“So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.”

— Alan Watts

“You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.”

— Alan Watts

“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.”

— Alan Watts

“Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.”

— Alan Watts

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

— Alan Watts

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

— Alan Watts

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

— Alan Watts

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

— Alan Watts

“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.”

— Alan Watts

“The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens.”

— Alan Watts

“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.”

— Alan Watts

“We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.”

— Alan Watts