Quotessence
Home / Authors / Alan W. Watts

Alan W. Watts Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

AllZenMindfulnessSpiritualityAlan WattsTaoismBiocentrismHuman NatureBuddhismNaturePantheismPhilosophyBiophiliaDeathFearGovernmentHeavenInspirationalL éSpirit Du ZenLa La LaLife

Famous Alan W. Watts Quotes

“In Zen Buddhist texts they say, “You cannot nail a peg into the sky.” And so, to be a man of the sky, a man of the void, is also called ‘a man not depending on anything’. And when you’re not hung on anything you are the only thing that isn’t hung on anything – which is the universe. Which doesn’t hang, you see. Where would it hang? It has no place to fall on, even though it may be dropping; there will never be the crash of it landing on a concrete floor somewhere. But the reason for that is that it won’t crash below because it doesn’t hang above. And so there is a poem, in Chinese, which speaks of such a person as having above, not a tile to cover the head; below, not an inch of ground on which to stand.”

GodSpiritualityUniverseBuddhismZenVoidImpermanenceClingingAlan Watts
Book:Out of Your Mind
Create image

“Le Zen sous-entend que l'on suive e mouvement de la vie, sans valoir ni l'arrêter ni interrompre son cours. C'est la raison pour laquelle on le définit quelquefois comme « un chemin sans détours », ou un « le fait d'aller droit devant soi ». Une telle attitude suppose une compréhension immédiate des choses en tant que vie et mouvement et non simplement en tant que sensations et concepts, lesquels ne sont que les symboles morts d'une réalité vivante. POur cette raison, Takuan commente l'arte de l'escrime (kendo) -- un art profondément imprégné des principes zen -- en ces termes: « Cette qualité, qu'on peut désigner par l'attitude mentale de ''non-ingérence'', constitue l'élément le plus vital tant dans l'art de l'escrime, que dans le Zen. Si deux actions sont distantes, même de l'épaisseur d'un cheveu, il y a interruption. » Lorsqu'on tape dans ses mains, le son se dégage immédiatement. Le son n'attend, ni ne pense avant de sortir. Il n'y a aucun état intermédiaireL un mouvement succède à un autre, sans l'intervention du mental conscient. Si vous êtes indécis et si vous réfléchissez à ce qu'il convient de faire, au moment où votre adversaire est prêt à vous abattre, vous lui laissez la place, c'est-à-dire la possibiliité de vous porter un coup fatal. Que votre défense suive l'attaque, sans intervalle, et il n'y aura pas deux mouvements séparés appelés attaque et défense.”

ZenZen BuddhismL éSpirit Du Zen
Book:The Spirit of Zen
Create image

“This is why modern civilization is in almost every respect a vicious circle. It is insatiably hungry because its way of life condemns it to perpetual frustration. [...] [T]he root of this frustration is that we live for the future, and the future is an abstraction, a rational inference from experience, which exists only for the brain. The "primary consciousness," the basic mind which knows reality rather than ideas about it, does not know the future. It lives completely in the present, and perceives nothing more that what is at this moment. The ingenious brain, however, looks at that part of present experience called memory, and by studying it is able to make predictions. These predictions are, relatively, so accurate and reliable (e.g., "everyone will die") that the future assumes a high degree of reality - so high that the present loses its value.”

MindfulnessZen
Book:The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Create image

“One of the blessings of easy communication between the great cultures of the world is that partisanship in religion and philosophy is ceasing to be intellectually respectable. Pure religions are as rare as pure cultures, and it is mentally crippling to suppose that there must be a number of fixed bodies of doctrine among which one must choose, where choice means accepting the system entirely or not at all. [...]. Those who rove freely through the various traditions, accepting what they can use and rejecting what they cannot, are condemned as undisciplined syncretists. But the use of one's reason is not a lack of discipline, not is there any important religion which is not itself a syncretism, a "growing up together" of ideas and practices of diverse origin.”

ZenTaoism
Book:psychotherapy east and west
Create image

“The rules of communication are not necessarily the rules of the universe, and man is not the role or identity which society thrusts upon him. For when a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique. He is universal by virtue of the inseparability of his organism from the cosmos. He is unique in that he is just this organism and not any stereotype of role, class, or identity assumed for the convenience of social communication.”

Zen
Book:psychotherapy east and west
Create image

“This is the whole meaning of polarity, of life implying death, of subject implying object, of man implying world, and Yes implying No. [...] Just as liberation involves the recognition of oneself in what is most other, it involves the recognition of life in death - and this is why so many rites of initiation take the neophyte through a symbolic death. He accepts the certainty of death so completely that, in effect, he is dead already - and thus beyond anxiety.”

Zen
Book:psychotherapy east and west
Create image

“Under any civilized conditions it is, of course, impossible for anyone to act without laying plans, or to refuse absolutely to participate in an economy of waste and violence, [...]. It is, however, possible to see that this competitive "rat race" need not be taken seriously, or rather, that if we are to persist in it at all it must not be taken seriously unless "nervous breakdowns are to become as common as colds”

ZenTaoism
Book:psychotherapy east and west
Create image

“Whenever a tradition becomes venerable with the passage of time, the ancient masters and sages are elevated to pedestals of sanctity and wisdom which lift them far above the human level. The way of liberation becomes confused with a popular cult; the ancient teachers become gods and supermen, and thus the ideal of liberation or Buddha-hood becomes ever more remote. No one believes that it can be reached except by the most gifted and heroic prodigies. Consequently the medicine of the discipline becomes a diet, the cure an addiction, and the raft a houseboat. In this manner, a way of liberation turns into just another social institution and dies of respectability.”

ZenTaoism
Book:psychotherapy east and west
Create image

“The point is not that one stops choosing, but that one chooses in the knowledge that there is really no choice. [...] It is simply that in a universe of relativity, all choosing, all taking of sides, is playful. But this is not that one feels no urgency. To know the relativity of light and darkness is not to be able to gaze unblinkingly into the sun; to know the relativity of up and down is not to be able to fall upward. To feel urgency without compulsion is the seemingly paradoxical way of describing what it is like for a feeling to arise spontaneously without its happening to a feeler.”

Zen
Book:psychotherapy east and west
Create image

“[T]he important point is that a world of inter-dependent relationships, where things are intelligible only in terms of of each other, is a seamless unity. In such a world it is impossible to consider man apart from nature, as an exiled spirit which controls this world by having its roots in another. Man is himself a loop in the endless knot, and as he pulls in one direction he finds that he is pulled from another and cannot find the origin of the impulse.”

MindfulnessZen
Book:Nature, Man and Woman
Create image

“But the idea of a purposeless world is horrifying because it is incomplete. Purpose is a pre-eminently human attribute. To say that the world has no purpose is to say that it is not human[.] For what is not human appears to be inhuman only when man sets himself over against nature, for then the inhumanity of nature seems to deny man, and its purposelessness to deny his purposes. But to say that nature is not human and has no purpose is not to say what it has instead. The human body as a whole is not a hand, but it does not for this reason deny the hand.”

ZenBiocentrism
Book:Nature, Man and Woman
Create image

“The more a person knows of himself, the more he will hesitate to define his nature and to assert what he must necessarily feel, and the more he will be astounded at his capacity to feel in unsuspected and unpredictable ways. Still more will this be so if he learns to explore, or feel deeply into, his negative states of feeling - his loneliness, sorrow, grief, depression, or fear - without trying to escape from them.”

ZenBiocentrism
Book:Nature, Man and Woman
Create image

“[W]hen I leave the Church and the city behind and go out under the sky, when I am with the birds, [...] with the clouds, [...] and with the oceans, [...] I cannot feel Christianity because I am in a world which grows from within. I am simply incapable of feeling its life as coming from above[.] More exactly, I cannot feel that its life comes from Another, from one who is qualitatively and spiritually external to all that lives and grows. On the contrary, I feel this whole world to be moved from the inside, and from an inside so deep that it is my inside as well, more truly I than my surface consciousness.”

ZenPantheismBiophilia
Author:Alan W. Watts
Create image

“I feel cut off only because I am split within myself, because I try to be divided from my own feelings and sensations. What I feel and sense therefore seems foreign to me. And on being aware of the unreality of this division, the universe does not seem foreign any more. For I am what I know; what I know is I. The sensation of a house across the street or of a star in outer space is no less I than an itch on the sole of my foot or an idea in my brain.”

PhilosophyPeaceMindfulnessZenPresencePantheismAlan Watts
Book:The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Create image

“The standard-brand religions [...] are — as now practiced — like exhausted mines: very hard to dig. With some exceptions not too easily found, their ideas about man and the world, their imagery, their rites, and their notions of the good life don't seem to fit in with the universe as we now know it, or with a human world that is changing so rapidly that much of what one learns in school is already obsolete on graduation day.”

BuddhismZen
Book:The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Create image

“In the strictest sense, we cannot actually think about life and reality at all, because this would have to include thinking about thinking, thinking about thinking about thinking, and so ad infinitum. One can only attempt a rational, descriptive philosophy of the universe on the assumption that one is totally separate from it. But if you and your thoughts are part of this universe, you cannot stand outside them to describe them.”

PhilosophyMindfulnessZen
Book:The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Create image

“When it comes down to it, government is simply an abandonment of responsibility on the assumption that there are people, other than ourselves, who really know how to manage things. But the government, run ostensibly for the good of the people, becomes a self-serving corporation. To keep things under control, it proliferates law of ever-increasing complexity and unintelligibility, and hinders productive work by demanding so much accounting on paper that the record of what has been done becomes more important than what has actually been done. [...] The Taoist moral is that people who mistrust themselves and one another are doomed.”

PhilosophyGovernmentPoliticsDemocracyZenTaoKrishnaEsotericism
Author:Alan W. Watts
Create image