212 Quotes by Alan W. Watts

[A]ny attempt to discover happiness is also an easy way to go crazy, and the world today is a crazy place just because people are trying to do it. We are a collection of people running wildly round in circles in frantic pursuit of our own selves, and the picture is not particularly edifying,[...] It is like trying to mend a hole in one part of a handkerchief by taking a patch from another. For the trouble is that all our schemes, systems, and devices are partial.

We see God every time we open our eyes; we inhale Him at every breath; we use His strength in every movement of our finger; we think Him in every thought, although we may not think of Him, and we taste Him in every bite of food.

[T]he wisdom of the East has a strictly practical aim which is not mere knowledge about the universe; it aims at a transformation of the individual and of his feeling for life through experience rather than belief. This experience is psychological or spiritual, not metaphysical, and except in certain specialized fields has no relation to occultism or to what we understand in the West as philosophy.

For man is always bound so long as he depends for his happiness on a partial experience; joy must always give way to sorrow, otherwise it can never be known as joy.

The present situation within and around oneself is Tao, for the present moment is life. Our memory of the past is contained in it as well as the potentiality of the future.

The whole situation in and around at this instant is a harmony with which you have to find your own union if you are able to be in accord with Tao. When you have discovered your own union with it, you will be in the state of Te, sometimes rendered as "virue" or "grace" or "power,' but best understood as Tao realized in man.

[W]u-wei means "nondoing" simply in the sense that by no action of our own can we bring ourselves into harmony with Tao, for [...] the secret of this harmony in the moment is not action but acceptance of a harmony already achieved by Tao itself. We do not alter the actual situation; but our attitude toward it undergoes a change whereby we feel harmony where before we felt discord.

[F]ire is not evil because it burns your fingers if you try to catch hold of it; it is only dangerous.

[L]ife and death are in conflict only in the mind which creates a war between them out of its own desires and fears. In fact life and death are not opposed but complementary, being the two essential factors of a greater life that is made up of living and dying just as melody is produced by the sounding and silencing of individual notes.