Quote

The Tao belongs neither to knowing nor not knowing. Knowing is false understanding not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it's like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?

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
Like
Beyond
Drag
Doubt
Belongs
Knowing
False
Understanding
Sky
Wrong
Blind
Understand
Neither
Right
Empty
Really
Ignorance
Tao

More quotes by Alan Watts

Image
The self-styled practical man of affairs who pooh-poohs philosophy as a lot of windy notions is himself a pragmatist or a positivist, and a bad one at that, since he has given no thought to his position.
Alan Watts
Image
The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from a giant pine that lives for a thousand years.
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
Image
Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.
Alan Watts
Image
The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens.
Alan Watts
Image
The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.
Alan Watts
Image
I want ... to consort with people whose emotions are not ... cold and standoffish.
Alan Watts
Image
Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair.
Alan Watts
Image
But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies.
Alan Watts
Image
Imagine a multidimensiona l spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image.
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
You, yourself, are the eternal energy which appears as this Universe. You didn't come into this world you came out of it. Like a wave from the ocean.
Alan Watts
Image
Duality is always secretly unity.
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
There is a peculiar contradiction in trying to be a member of a republic while believing that the universe is a monarchy.
Alan Watts
Image
To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening.
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
What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.
Alan Watts
Image
And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plowshares into swords
Alan Watts
Image
For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method.
Alan Watts