Alan Watts

Alan Watts

23 quotes

British and American writer and lecturer Alan Watts has a gift for language that makes complex ideas feel instantly clear. Beyond interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience, Alan Watts proved equally skilled at capturing ideas in a sentence or two. 38 of Alan Watts's sharpest quotes live here, spanning themes of God, Faith, Future, Trust, and Religion. Start here and see if you agree: "But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be."

“You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.”

— Alan Watts

Great

All Quotes by Alan Watts

“And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.”

— Alan Watts

Attitude

“You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.”

— Alan Watts

Great

“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.”

— Alan Watts

Future

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

— Alan Watts

Change

“But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.”

— Alan Watts

Attitude

“The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.”

— Alan Watts

Great

“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.”

— Alan Watts

Fear

“Religion is not a department of life it is something that enters into the whole of it.”

— Alan Watts

Religion

“The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.”

— Alan Watts

God

“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.”

— Alan Watts

Faith

“The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.”

— Alan Watts

God

“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

Technology

“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.”

— Alan Watts

Faith

“Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”

— Alan Watts

God

“But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.”

— Alan Watts

Power

“No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.”

— Alan Watts

Future

“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.”

— Alan Watts

History

“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

Relationship

“The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.”

— Alan Watts

God

“You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.”

— Alan Watts

God