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World Quotes by Alan Watts

46 World quotes by Alan Watts

All World quotes Alan Watts’s page

Mysticism and empiricism are linked as opposite forces that together shape experience. The world is described as a playful dance, like Hindu Lila. The quotes also suggest that social institutions can be seen as games and that Zen teaches a calm, non‑sticky detachment.

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The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.

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Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.

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A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

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Do you define yourself as a victim of the world? Or, as the world?

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Do you see yourself as a victim of the world, or do you see yourself as the world?

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You are something that the whole world is doing just as when the sea has waves on it.

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Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it.

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The world is a marvelous system of wiggles.

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You, yourself, are the eternal energy which appears as this Universe. You didn't come into this world; you came out of it.…

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Western religions are more concerned with behavior, doctrine, and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware…

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Philosophy is man’s expression of curiosity about everything and his attempt to make sense of the world primarily through his intellect.

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Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do…

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The world is in an extremely dangerous situation, and serious diseases often require the risk of a dangerous cure like the Pasteur…

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The anitya doctrine is, again, not quite the simple assertion that the world is impermanent, but rather that the more one grasps…

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

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A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with Reality, and lives…

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As muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone, it could be argued that those who sit quietly and do nothing…

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Time is a social institution and not a physical reality. There is no such thing as time in the natural world -…

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The fools standpoint is that all social institutions are games. He sees the whole world as game playing. That's why, when people…

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Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the…

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This is what Zen means by being detached—not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky…

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I knew of a physicist at the University of Chicago who was rather crazy like some scientists, and the idea of the…

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There is an ineffable mystery that underlies ourselves and the world. It is the darkness from which the light shines. When you…

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The point is seeing that THIS - the immediate, everyday and present experience - is IT, the entire and ultimate point for…

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There is no mission, nor interest to convert, and yet I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal,…

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We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have…

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What are plants doing? What are plants all about? They serve human beings by being decorative, but what is it from its…

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If we want justice for minorities and cooled wars with our natural enemies, whether human or non-human, we must first come to…

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If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present.…

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so, the whole idea, you see, is that everything's falling apart, so don't try and stop it. when you're falling off a…

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The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only…

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If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are “crying for the moon.”…

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The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it…

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When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and…

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Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing,…

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Lack of love for the vegetative, subtle, cthonic, pagan, and sexy aspect of the world means death.

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But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

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The psychotherapist ... tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his…

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Different Chinese philosophers, writing probably in 5-4 centuries B.C., presented some major ideas and a way of life that are nowadays known…

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There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no…

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More by Alan Watts

“The self-conscious feedback mechanism of the cortex allows us the hallucination that we are two souls in one body -a rational soul and an…

The more we try to catch hold of the present moment the more elusive it becomes. It is like trying to clutch water in…

The Universe is the game of the self, which plays hide and seek forever and ever.

If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall…

...mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.

The hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests.

Although profoundly "inconsequential," the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity,…

Everything is perpetually becoming new.

The psychotherapist ... tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to…

“As you make more and more powerful microscopic instruments, the universe has to get smaller and smaller in order to escape the investigation. Just…

We are at the moment looking at space as something to be entered by the tremendous thrust of a rocket because that is the…

A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.

The best way to convince someone is by making him realize that what you speak came from his own mind.

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of…

To feel that life is meaningless unless “I” can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch.