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
Alan Watts quotes about
Change is an illusion because we're always at the place where any future can take us.
There is a peculiar contradiction in trying to be a member of a republic while believing that the universe is a monarchy.
The Chinese word Li may therefore be understood as organic order, as distinct from mechanical or legal order, both of which go by the book. Li is the asymmetrical, nonrepetitive, and unregimented order which we find in the patterns of moving water, the form of trees and clouds, of frost crystals on the window, or the scattering of pebbles on beach sand.
The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
It is also in despair of being able to understand or make any productive contribution to the highly organised chaos of our politico-economic system that large numbers of people simply abandon political and social committments. They just let society be taken over by a pattern of organisation which is as self-proliferative as a weed, and whose ends and values are neither human nor instinctive but mechanical.
...the habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism: to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns.
...the whole universe is through and through the playing of love in every shade of the word's use, from animal lust to divine charity.
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.
There is no mission, nor interest to convert, and yet I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter. We should see at once that the high ideals for which we are killing and regimenting each other are empty and abstract substiutes for the unheeded miracles that surround us - not only in the obvious wonders of nature but also in the overwhelming uncanny fact of mere existence.
...for since there is no real 'way' to sartori, the way you are following makes very little difference.
The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.
For a decision-the freest of my actions just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.
The Universe is the game of the self, which plays hide and seek forever and ever.
No worthwhile life can be lived without risks, despite current American superstitions to the contrary...