Alan Watts Quotes

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at itself and exploring itself.

When you get the message, hang up the phone.

When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing but things.

When we attempt to universalize or absolutize it, the ethical standpoint makes it impossible to exist, for we cannot live for a day without destroying the life of some other creature.

What you see out there is, immediately, how the inside of your head “looks” or “feels.”

What you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call “here and now,” and you are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.

What you are basically – deep, deep down and far, far in – is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.

What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? I mean, what was it like to wake up when you were born? See, you can’t have the experience of nothing, so after you’re dead, the only thing that can happen is the same experience that happened when you were born.

We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.