33 Quotes by Alan W. Watts about zen

  • Author Alan W. Watts
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    A great Zen master said just before he died, "From the bathtub, to the bathtub, I have uttered stuff and nonsense." The bathtub in which the baby is washed at birth, the bathtub in which the corpse is washed before burial, all this time I have said much nonsense.

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  • Author Alan W. Watts
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    The standard-brand religions [...] are — as now practiced — like exhausted mines: very hard to dig. With some exceptions not too easily found, their ideas about man and the world, their imagery, their rites, and their notions of the good life don't seem to fit in with the universe as we now know it, or with a human world that is changing so rapidly that much of what one learns in school is already obsolete on graduation day.

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  • Author Alan W. Watts
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    [T]he function of the brain is to serve the present and the real, not to send man chasing wildly after the phantom of the future.

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  • Author Alan W. Watts
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    For when we have Eros dominated by reason instead of Eros expressing itself with reason, we create a culture that is simply against life, in which the human organism has to submit more and more to the needs of mechanical organization, to postpone enjoyment in the name of an even more futile utility.

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  • Author Alan W. Watts
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    When cultural disciplines are in the service of Eros, ethics are transformed from the rules of repression into the technique of expression, and morality becomes the aesthetics of behavior.

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  • Author Alan W. Watts
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    Liberation is not the release of the soul from the body; it is recovery from the tactical split between the soul and the body[.]

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  • Author Alan W. Watts
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    [A]ny system which leaves the individual upon one horn of the dualistic dilemma is at best the achievement of courageous despair.

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