212 Quotes by Alan W. Watts

True, the seed does not intend to move itself with the wind, but neither did I intend to have arms and legs.

Yet could anything be more obvious than that the past follows from the present like a comet's tail, and that if we are to be alive at all, here is the place to be?

There is no difference in principle between sharpening perception with an external instrument, such as a microscope, and sharpening it with an internal instrument, such as one of these three drugs. If they are an affront to the dignity of the mind, the microscope is an affront to the dignity of the eye and the telephone to the dignity of the ear. Strictly speaking, these drugs do not impart wisdom at all, any more than the microscope alone gives knowledge.

[T]he present is self-sufficient, but it is not a static present. It is a dancing present—the unfolding of a pattern which has no specific destination in the future but is simply its own point. It leaves and arrives simultaneously, and the seed is as much the goal as the flower.

I am not looking at the world, not confronting it; I am knowing it by a continuous process of transforming it into myself, so that everything around me, the whole globe of space, no longer feels away from me but in the middle.

Evil” read backwards is “live.” Demon est deus inversus.

Kindly let me help you or you will drown said the monkey putting the fish safely up a tree.

How can a republic be the best form of government if the universe, heaven and hell are all a monarchy?

[T]he complexity of nature is not innate but a consequence of the instruments used to handle it. There is nothing complex about walking, breathing, and circulating one's blood. Living organisms have developed these functions without without thinking about them at all. The circulation of the blood becomes complex only when stated in physiological terms, that is, when understood by means of a conceptual model constructed of the kind of simple units which conscious attention requires.