Alan W. Watts quotes:

A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.

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.

In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.

If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid.

The knowledge of the past stays with us. To let go is simply to release any images and emotions.

Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed

Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.

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.

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

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.

Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body, he 'has' a body. Instead of living and loving he 'has' instincts for survival and copulation.

There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.

You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way

For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.

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.

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.

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

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

Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated

One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.

Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.