48 Insightful Quotes By Alan Watts
Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.
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.
Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.
Faith is a state of openness or trust.
If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.
The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.
The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.
Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.
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.
But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.
And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.
But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.
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.
But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.
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.
We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.
But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
Saints need sinners.
A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.
So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.
So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.
Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it's just doing it.
In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.
The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.
You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.
