Alan Watts
Alan Watts
Alan Wilson Wattswas a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest in 1945, then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth6 January 1915
A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.
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.
Sexual love is a troubled and problematic relationship in cultures where there is a strong sense of man's separation from nature, especially when the realm of nature is felt to be inferior or contaminated with evil.
If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives we may forget altogether to live them.
If the human race develops an electronic nervous system, outside the bodies of individual people, thus giving us all one mind and one global body, this is almost precisely what has happened in the organization of cells which compose our own bodies. We have already done it. [...] If all this ends with the human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns, why should that trouble us? For that is exactly what we are now!
Faith...is letting go and trusting oneself to the unknown.
What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.
But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
No worthwhile life can be lived without risks, despite current American superstitions to the contrary...
I have no other self than the totality of the things of which I am aware.
Courage is the goal of cowards.
... preliminary accounting, banking and surveying (known as arithmetic, algebra and geometry).
No one's mouth is big enough to utter the whole thing.
When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there...You're looking at you..