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
There is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion.
Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.
What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.
There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again.
Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree.
The menu is not the meal.
Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.
Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.
Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.
You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.
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.
The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.