"The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is"
Read quote
7 likes
Quote collection
Alan Watts quotes (page 17 of 25)
499 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The question "What shall we do about it?" is only asked by those who do not understand the problem. If a problem can be solved at all, to understand it and to know what to do about it are the same thing. On the other hand, doing something about a problem which you do not understand is like trying to clear away darkness by thrusting it aside with your hands. When light is brought, the darkness vanishes at once."
Read quote
7 likes
"There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it."
Read quote
7 likes
"The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible."
Read quote
7 likes
"There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied."
Read quote
7 likes
"The problem is to overcome the ingrained disbelief in the power of winning nature by love, in the gentle (ju) way (do) of turning with the skid, of controlling ourselves by cooperating with ourselves."
Read quote
7 likes
"...[W]ords can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences."
Read quote
7 likes
"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."
Read quote
7 likes
"We therefore work, not for the work's sake, but for money—and money is supposed to get us what we really want in our hours of leisure and play. In the United States even poor people have lots of money compared with the wretched and skinny millions of India, Africa, and China, while our middle andupper classes (or should we say "income groups") are as prosperous as princes. Yet, by and large, they have but slight taste for pleasure. Money alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy."
Read quote
7 likes
"A holy person is someone who is whole; who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites."
Read quote
7 likes
"The more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually killing what we love."
Read quote
7 likes
"What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it."
Read quote
7 likes
"The Chinese word Li may therefore be understood as organic order, as distinct from mechanical or legal order, both of which go by the book. Li is the asymmetrical, nonrepetitive, and unregimented order which we find in the patterns of moving water, the form of trees and clouds, of frost crystals on the window, or the scattering of pebbles on beach sand."
Read quote
7 likes
"The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity and it is really impossible to tell whether something that happens in it is good or bad. Because you never know what will be the consequences of the misfortune. Or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune."
Read quote
7 likes
"We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a seperate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body-a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange."
Read quote
7 likes
"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."
Read quote
7 likes
"Our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don't learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life."
Read quote
7 likes
"Although profoundly "inconsequential," the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied it lends an unmistakable quality to the work."
Read quote
7 likes
"It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odduncanny and highly improbable. G.K.Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don't. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things."
Read quote
7 likes
"Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it."
Read quote
7 likes