212 Quotes by Alan W. Watts

The more a person knows of himself, the more he will hesitate to define his nature and to assert what he must necessarily feel, and the more he will be astounded at his capacity to feel in unsuspected and unpredictable ways. Still more will this be so if he learns to explore, or feel deeply into, his negative states of feeling - his loneliness, sorrow, grief, depression, or fear - without trying to escape from them.

[O]ur feelings are not fixed, unrelated states, but slowly or rapidly swinging motions such that a perpetuity of joy would be as meaningless as the notion of swinging only to the right.

My sense of kinship with this world is not only with its obviously sympathetic and and beautiful aspects, but also with the horrendous and strange. For I have found that the monstrous and inhuman aspects of fish and insects and reptiles are not so much in them as in me. They are external embodiments of my natural creeps and shudders at the thought of pain and death.

For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.

[I]t would seem that to be incapable of sitting and watching with the mind completely at rest is to be incapable of experiencing the world in which we live to the full. For one does not know the world simply in thinking about it and doing about it. One must first experience it more directly, and prolong the experience without jumping to conclusions.

This is not a philosophy of not looking where one is going; it is a philosophy of not making where one is going so much more important than where one is that there will be no point in going.

[I]t is typical of Zen that its style of action has the strongest feeling of commitment, of "follow-through." It enters into everything wholeheartedly and freely without having to keep an eye on itself. It does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

For the task of the psychotherapist is to bring about a reconciliation between individual feeling and social norms without, however, sacrificing the integrity of the individual.

[T]he therapist who is really interested in helping the individual is forced into social criticism. This does not mean that he has to engage directly in political revolution; it means that he has to help the individual in liberating himself from various forms of social conditioning, which includes liberation from from hating this conditioning - hatred being a form of bondage to its object.