Alan Watts Quotes
"The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.""We are not going to be able to operate our spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.""The more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love.""The only zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the zen you bring up there.""Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.""Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.""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.""This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.""A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.""When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.""If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.""The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.""The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.""The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.""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""Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal. For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever.""Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be.""Everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep down basic whatever there is. And you're all that... only you're pretending you're not.""You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.""We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree."