Quotes by Alan Watts

About Alan Watts:

Alan Wilson Watts was a British-born 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 of the American Academy of Asian Studies.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

Alan Watts

So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

I owe my solitude to other people.

Alan Watts

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

Alan Watts

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

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

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

Alan Watts

Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.

Alan Watts

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

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

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.

Alan Watts

And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment.

Alan Watts

Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it's just doing it.

Alan Watts

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.

Alan Watts

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

Alan Watts

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

Alan Watts

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

Alan Watts

The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.

Alan Watts

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens.

Alan Watts

Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.

Alan Watts

Author Bio

  • NameAlan Watts
  • DescriptionBritish philosopher, writer and speaker
  • BornJanuary 6, 1915
  • DiedNovember 16, 1973
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionPhilosopher; Theologian; Writer