Alan Watts quotes - page 3

When you tell a girl how beautiful she is, she will say, "Now isn't that just like a man! All you men think about is bodies. OK, so I'm beautiful, but I got my body from my parents and it was just luck. I prefer to be admired for myself, not my chassis." Poor little chauffeur! All she is saying is that she has lost touch with her own astonishing wisdom and ingenuity, and wants to be admired for some trivial tricks that she can perform with her conscious attention. And we are all in the same situation, having dissociated ourselves from our bodies and from the whole network of forces in which bodies can come to birth and live. (Alan Watts)
For several years I have referred to this, hitherto, rare and inaccessible work as the I-told-you-so-book, because it has often been implied that I have invented my explanations of Buddhism out of thin air, thus falsifying its authentic teachings... Yet, despite the occultist flavor of its title, The Secret Oral Teachings in the Tibetan Buddhist Sects is the most direct, no-nonsense, and down-to-earth explanation of Mahayana Buddhism which has thus far been written. View quote
Alan Watts
No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen. View quote
Alan Watts
Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence. View quote
Alan Watts
I owe my solitude to other people. View quote
Alan Watts
Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way. View quote
Alan Watts
Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present. View quote
Alan Watts
In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all. View quote
Alan Watts
Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together. View quote
Alan Watts
You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean. View quote
Alan Watts
The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present. (Alan Watts)
You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes. View quote
Alan Watts
Faith is a state of openness or trust. View quote
Alan Watts
There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. View quote
Alan Watts
You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you. View quote
Alan Watts
But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is. View quote
Alan Watts
A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world. View quote
Alan Watts
The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible. View quote
Alan Watts
But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful. View quote
Alan Watts
The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile. View quote
Alan Watts
The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention. (Alan Watts)
But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us. View quote
Alan Watts
What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself. View quote
Alan Watts
If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly. View quote
Alan Watts
So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level. View quote
Alan Watts