"We tend to regard ourselves as puppets of the Past, driven along by something that is always behind us."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Alan Watts quotes (page 24 of 25)
499 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know."
Read quote
3 likes
"The police have enough work to keep them busy regulating automobile traffic, preventing robberies and crimes of violence and helping lost children and little old ladies find their way home. As long as the police confine themselves to such activities they are respected friends of the public. But as soon as they begin inquiring into people's private morals, they become nothing more than armed clergymen."
Read quote
3 likes
"Here's an example: someone says, "Master, please hand me the knife," and he hands them the knife, blade first. "Please give me the other end," he says. And the master replies, "What would you do with the other end?" This is answering an everyday matter in terms of the metaphysical. When the question is, "Master, what is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?" Then he replies, "There is enough breeze in this fan to keep me cool." That is answering the metaphysical in terms of the everyday, and that is, more or less, the principle zen works on. The mundane and the sacred are one and the same."
Read quote
3 likes
"The role of the Guru is to show the person that he already has what he is looking for."
Read quote
3 likes
"I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek."
Read quote
3 likes
"No one's mouth is big enough to utter the whole thing."
Read quote
3 likes
"People often say to me, 'I understand what you are talking about intellectually, but I don't really feel it, I don't realize it,' and I am apt to reply, 'I wonder whether you do understand it intellectually, because if you did you would also feel it.'"
Read quote
3 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... within I don't know how many years, but in not too long a time, it's going to become basic common sense that you are not some alien being who confronts an external world that is not you, but that almost every intelligent person will have the feeling of being an activity of the entire universe."
Read quote
3 likes
"Any systems approaching perfect self-control also approaches perfect self-frustration."
Read quote
3 likes
"I knew of a physicist at the University of Chicago who was rather crazy like some scientists, and the idea of the insolidity, the instability of the physical world impressed him so much that he used to go around in enormous padded slippers for fear he should fall through the floor."
Read quote
3 likes
"For we have never actually understood the revolutionary sense beneath them – the incredible truth that what religion calls the vision of God is found in giving up any belief in the idea of God."
Read quote
3 likes
"...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."
Read quote
3 likes
"Religion is always falling apart."
Read quote
3 likes
"Now, you see, if you understand what I'm saying, with your intelligence, and then take the next step and say "But I understood it now, but I didn't feel it." Then, next I raise the question: Why do you want to feel it? You say: "I want something more", because that's again that spiritual greed. And you could only say that because you didn't understand it."
Read quote
3 likes
"...for since there is no real 'way' to sartori, the way you are following makes very little difference."
Read quote
3 likes
"Perhaps there is no other knowing than the mere competence of the act. If at the heart of one's being, there is no self to which one ought to be true, then sincerity is simply nerve; it lies in the unabashed vigor of the pretense. But pretense is only pretense when it is assumed that the act is not true to the agent. Find the agent."
Read quote
3 likes
"I have no other self than the totality of the things of which I am aware."
Read quote
3 likes
"The sound of the rain needs no translation. In music one doesn't make the end of the composition the point of the composition... Same way in dancing, you don't aim at one particular spot in the room... The whole point of dancing is the dance."
Read quote
3 likes
"Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself."
Read quote
3 likes