“But Taoism must on no account be understood as a revolution against convention, although it has sometimes been used as a pretext… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“For Lao-tzu’s Taoism is the philosophical equivalent of jujitsu, or judo, which means the way of gentleness. Its basis is the principle… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“According to tradition, the originator of Taoism, Lao-tzu, was an older contemporary of Kung Fu-tzu, or Confucius, who died in 479 B.C.1… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“For Taoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge, with the understanding of life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“It is fundamental to both Taoist and Confucian thought that the natural man is to be trusted, and from their standpoint it… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“The common mistake of the religious celibate has been to suppose that the highest spiritual life absolutely demands the renunciation of sexuality, as if… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“Real freedom cannot exist alongside false freedom, but the abandonment of false freedom looks as if it would leave you as good as dead.… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“But it is not that you are something which is just watching what happens. “What happens” is just using your organism to watch itself.… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“Read Theodore Schwenk’s marvelous book Sensitive Chaos (London, Rudolph Steiner Press, 1965),” — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“Idolatry is not the use of images, but confusing them with what they represent, and in this respect mental images and lofty abstractions can… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“The more we accustom ourselves to understanding the present in terms of memory, the unknown by the known, the living by the dead, the… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“We do not dance to reach a certain point on the floor, but simply to dance. Energy itself, as William Blake said, is eternal… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought.… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“But this is at the same time a vivid way of saying that your soul, or rather your essential Self, is the whole cosmos… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“When you no longer make the distinction between the universe and how you are acting upon it, you are really on your own and… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern in the water.” — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“I have always thought that all philosophical debates are ultimately between the partisans of structure and the partisans of "goo.” — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“Where there is to be creative action, it is quite beside the point to discuss what we should or should not do in order… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
