212 Quotes by Alan W. Watts

There is no way of wasting time. Because what is time for, except to be wasted?

I feel cut off only because I am split within myself, because I try to be divided from my own feelings and sensations. What I feel and sense therefore seems foreign to me. And on being aware of the unreality of this division, the universe does not seem foreign any more. For I am what I know; what I know is I. The sensation of a house across the street or of a star in outer space is no less I than an itch on the sole of my foot or an idea in my brain.

If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself – not as a stranger in the world, not as something here unprobational, not as something that has arrived here by fluke - but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.

When the critical intellect looks at anything carefully, it vanishes. [...] The reason is, of course, that ''things'' exist only relatively - for a point of view or for convenience of description. Thus when we inspect any unit more closely we find that its structure is more complex and more differentiated than we had supposed. Its variety comes to impress us more than its unity. This is why there is something of the spirit of debunking in all scholarship and scientific inquiry.

Associations which form themselves in poetic imagination are, after all, associations which exist in nature, though not along the lines of connection which factual language ordinarily describes.

Tao and Nirvana are only names for an experience; those who invented them had the experience first and gave it its name afterward, but now people are so busy learning about the names that they forget the experience.

Trying to explain Zen is like trying to catch wind in a box; the moment you the lid it ceases to be wind and in time becomes stagnant air.

Zen concentrates on the importance of seeing into one's own nature now at this moment - not in five minutes when you have had time to "accept" yourself, nor ten years ahead when you have had time to retire to the mountains and meditate.

The free man walks straight ahead; he has no hesitations and never looks behind, for he knows that there is nothing in the future and nothing in the past that can shake his freedom.Freedom does not belong to him; it is no more his property than the wind, and as he does not possess it he is not possessed by it. And because he never looks behind his actions are said to leave no trace, like the passage of a bird through air.