Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up, now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.
ALAN WATTSPlaying a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat’s entrails with horsehair.
More Alan Watts Quotes
-
-
No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.
ALAN WATTS -
If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.
ALAN WATTS -
I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.
ALAN WATTS -
The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
ALAN WATTS -
The ego-self constantly pushes reality away. It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories.
ALAN WATTS -
We know that from time to time, there arise among human beings, people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.
ALAN WATTS -
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.
ALAN WATTS -
The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.
ALAN WATTS -
Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.
ALAN WATTS -
Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot.
ALAN WATTS -
There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can’t be said.
ALAN WATTS -
You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.
ALAN WATTS -
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
ALAN WATTS -
In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it’s all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.
ALAN WATTS -
A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
ALAN WATTS -
Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
ALAN WATTS -
When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
ALAN WATTS -
Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.
ALAN WATTS -
You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.
ALAN WATTS -
The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality.
ALAN WATTS -
Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt.
ALAN WATTS -
A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
ALAN WATTS -
We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision.
ALAN WATTS -
You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.
ALAN WATTS -
Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.
ALAN WATTS -
The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually ‘grasp’ reality.
ALAN WATTS