Quote

But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

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
Ink
Dear
Reality
Men
Rorschach
Blot

More quotes by Alan Watts

Image
When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be.
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
The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
Alan Watts
Image
If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.
Alan Watts
Image
If we live, we live if we die, we die if we suffer, we suffer if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it.
Alan Watts
Image
The Highest to which people can attain is wonder and if the prime phenomenon makes them wonder, let them be content nothing higher can it give them, and nothing further should they seek for behind it there is the limit.
Alan Watts
Image
We know that from time to time there arise among human beings people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.
Alan Watts
Image
Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
Alan Watts
Image
I knew of a physicist at the University of Chicago who was rather crazy like some scientists, and the idea of the insolidity, the instability of the physical world impressed him so much that he used to go around in enormous padded slippers for fear he should fall through the floor.
Alan Watts
Image
Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.
Alan Watts
Image
When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was.
Alan Watts
Image
Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery.
Alan Watts
Image
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.
Alan Watts
Image
The anitya doctrine is, again, not quite the simple assertion that the world is impermanent, but rather that the more one grasps at the world, the more it changes.
Alan Watts
Image
I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
Alan Watts
Image
We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.
Alan Watts
Image
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
Alan Watts
Image
Everyone is the fabric and structure of existence.
Alan Watts
Image
When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
Alan Watts
Image
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
Alan Watts