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…

— Alan Watts

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

— Alan Watts

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

— Alan Watts

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

— Alan Watts

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

— Alan Watts

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

— Alan Watts

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

— Alan Watts

Everything is perpetually becoming new.

— Alan Watts

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

— Alan Watts

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

— Alan Watts

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

— Alan Watts

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

— Alan Watts

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

— Alan Watts

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

— Alan Watts

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

— Alan Watts

Don't hurry anything. Don't worry about the future. Don't worry about what progress you're making. Just be entirely content to be aware…

— Alan Watts

When death comes, it's just like winter. We don't say, "There ought not to be winter." That the winter season, when the…

— Alan Watts

Here's an example: someone says, "Master, please hand me the knife," and he hands them the knife, blade first. "Please give me…

— Alan Watts

As the fish doesn't know water, people are ignorant of space. Consciousness is concerned only with changing and varying details; it ignores…

— Alan Watts

I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate…

— Alan Watts

It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.

— Alan Watts

Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts…

— Alan Watts

Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.

— Alan Watts

In Hindu philosophy the whole creation is regarded as the Vishnu Lila, the play of Vishnu. Lila means dance or play. Also…

— Alan Watts

These people, as far as I can see, do not congregate in the notorious centers of the movement, like the North Beach…

— Alan Watts