Quote

There is a peculiar contradiction in trying to be a member of a republic while believing that the universe is a monarchy.

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
Republic
Believing
Members
Universe
Trying
Monarchy
Believe
Member
Contradiction
Peculiar

More quotes by Alan Watts

Image
If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid.
Alan Watts
Image
To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.
Alan Watts
Image
There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.
Alan Watts
Image
This is what Zen means by being detached—not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.
Alan Watts
Image
When one speaks of awakening, it means de-hypnotizatio n coming to your senses. But of course to do that, you have to go out of your mind.
Alan Watts
Image
One's life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If one is paranoid, the other is metanoid.
Alan Watts
Image
We have a strange anxiety in us that if we don't interfere then it won't happen. Now that's the root of an enormous amount of trouble.
Alan Watts
Image
A less 'brainy-culture' would learn to synchronise its body rhythms rather than its clocks.
Alan Watts
Image
When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.
Alan Watts
Image
We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.
Alan Watts
Image
We do not come into this world we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.
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
Time is a social institution and not a physical reality. There is no such thing as time in the natural world - the world of stars and waters, clouds, mountains and living organisms. There is such a thing as rhythm - rhythm of tides, rhythm of biological processes... There is rhythm and there is motion. Time is a way of measuring motion.
Alan Watts
Image
Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it.
Alan Watts
Image
Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap.
Alan Watts
Image
How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.
Alan Watts
Image
What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are coins for real thing
Alan Watts
Image
A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with Reality, and lives in a world of illusion.
Alan Watts
Image
All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head.
Alan Watts
Image
We have allowed brain thinking to develop and dominate our lives. As a consequence, we are at war within ourselves. The brain desiring things which the body does not want, and the body desiring things which the brain does not allow the brain giving directions which the body will not follow, and the body giving impulses which the brain cannot
Alan Watts