Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
Alan Watts
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
Alan Watts
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.
Alan Watts
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
Alan Watts
Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
Alan Watts
The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.
Alan Watts
You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.
Alan Watts
But I’ll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything.
Alan Watts
Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
Alan Watts
I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
Alan Watts
I owe my solitude to other people.
Alan Watts
But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.
Alan Watts
Wars based on principle are far more destructive… the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.
Alan Watts
The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.
Alan Watts
We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
Alan Watts
Saints need sinners.
Alan Watts
No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
Alan Watts
Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.
Alan Watts
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
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
Alan Watts
Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.
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.
Alan Watts
You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
Alan Watts
You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.
Alan Watts
The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it’s only money… they don’t know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
Alan Watts
But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
Alan Watts
How is it possible that a being with such 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.
Alan Watts