Alan Watts quotes that will change your perspective on lifeTo this day, Alan Watts’s impactful and wise words circulate through the culture. We find them in the many books he left behind, countless lectures and pop-culture references galore. While it is no easy feat to distill the many whimsical phrases and knowledge Watts left, these quotes attempt to paint a broad picture of the Eastern scholar and philosopher-entertainer
Zen philosophy
Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes.
- “A proper exposition of Zen should tease us out of thought, and leave the mind like an open window instead of a panel of stained glass.” Nirvana is right where you are, provided that you don’t object to it.
Alan Watts on Love
There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied.
- Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and frustration of trying to love himself.
- It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.”
- No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.”
Alan Watts and humankind
Our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own
- We think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society
- “This is not a materialistic civilization at all. It is a civilization devoted to the hatred and destruction of material, its conversion into junk and poison gas.”
- Watts
Alan Watts on God
“Everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. And you’re all that, only you’re pretending you’re not.”
- “How is it possible that a being with sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god?”
What happens if you know that there is nothing you can do to be better?
“The physical universe is basically playful. There’s no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn’t going anywhere; that is to say, it doesn’t have a destination that it ought to arrive at. But it is best understood by analogy to music, because music as an art form is essentially playful.”
