552 Quotes by Alan Watts

The menu is not the meal.

To notice is to select, toregard some bits of perception, or some features of the world, as morenoteworthy, more significant, than others. To these we attend, and therest we ignore—for which reason conscious attention is at the same time ignorance despite the fact that it gives us a vividlyclear picture of whatever we choose to notice.

Existence is basically a kind of dancing or music--an immensely complex energy pattern which needs no explanation other than itself--just as wee do not ask what is the meaning of fugues by Bach or sonatas by Mozart. We do not dance to reach a certain point on the floor, but simply to dance. Energy itself, as William Blake said, is eternal delight--and all life is to be lived in the spirit of rapt absorption in an arabesque of rhythms.

We do not dance to reach a certain point on the floor, but simply to dance.

Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated

...behind the scene, under the surface of reality, you are all actors, marvelously skilled at playing parts and in getting lost in the mazes of your own minds and the entanglements of your own affairs, as if this were the most urgent thing going on. But behind the scenes, in the green room - in the very back of your mind and the very depth of your soul - you always have a sneaking suspicion that you might not be the you that you think you are.

A banquet hall deserted, after the revelry, all the guests have left and gone their ways. And the table, with overturned glasses, crumbled napkins, bread crumbs, dirty knives and forks, lies empty. And the laughter echoes only in one’s mind… And then the echo goes, the memory, the traces are all gone.

If we are open only to discoveries which will accord with what we know already, we may as well stay shut.

When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of … Nothing is left but to love.