Quote

If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed

Alan Watts

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alan Watts
Age: 58 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 6
Died: 1973
Died: November 16
Anglican Priest
Author
Dramaturge
Musician
Philosopher
Theologian
Videographer
Writer
Kent
England
System
Nature
Cannot
Without
Paralyzed
Whole
Mistrust
Even
Underlying
Trust
Simply

More quotes by Alan Watts

Image
The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually “grasp” reality.
Alan Watts
Image
...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.
Alan Watts
Image
If you want to stay in a state of illusion, stay in it. But you can always wake up.
Alan Watts
Image
The psychotherapist ... tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to be in the world (of social convention) but not of the world.
Alan Watts
Image
Do you see yourself as a victim of the world, or do you see yourself as the world?
Alan Watts
Image
Buddhism ... is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or loyal opposition to the culture in which it is involved.
Alan Watts
Image
The problem is to overcome the ingrained disbelief in the power of winning nature by love, in the gentle (ju) way (do) of turning with the skid, of controlling ourselves by cooperating with ourselves.
Alan Watts
Image
Cows scream louder than carrots.
Alan Watts
Image
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
Alan Watts
Image
You can't get wet from the word 'water.'
Alan Watts
Image
We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.
Alan Watts
Image
If you belong to an in-group of good, or saved, or elite people, you can only know that you’re in because someone else is out. You cannot live on the right side of the tracks without there being a wrong side of the tracks, so you ought to be grateful to the outside for having the privilege of being on the inside.
Alan Watts
Image
By going out of your mind, you come to your senses
Alan Watts
Image
The sound of the rain needs no translation. In music one doesn't make the end of the composition the point of the composition... Same way in dancing, you don't aim at one particular spot in the room... The whole point of dancing is the dance.
Alan Watts
Image
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
Image
If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives we may forget altogether to live them.
Alan Watts
Image
The hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests.
Alan Watts
Image
But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
Alan Watts
Image
If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.
Alan Watts
Image
The question is not what I should do in the future to get it, but rather, what am I presently doing that prevents me from realizing it right now?
Alan Watts