Alan Watts Quotes

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had.

By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us.

Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith-in life, in other people, and in oneself-is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.

When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.

A holy person is someone who is whole; who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites.

The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge. Just as a knife doesn’t cut itself, fire doesn’t burn itself, light doesn’t illuminate itself. It’s always an endless mystery to itself.

As the fish doesn’t know water, people are ignorant of space. Consciousness is concerned only with changing and varying details; it ignores constants-especially constant backgrounds. Thus only very exceptional people are aware of what is basic to everything.

Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever.

So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

Running away from fear is fear; fighting pain is pain; trying to be brave is being scared