01c. 1944 ADCarried to its final extreme, the logical end of this type of reaction to life is suicide. The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already deadAlan Watts / quote ↗
02c. 1944 ADBuddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent... this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering.Alan Watts / quote ↗
03c. 1944 ADNever pretend to a love which you do not actually feel for love is not ours to command.Alan Watts / quote ↗
04c. 1944 ADZen is a way of liberation concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous but what is.Alan Watts / quote ↗
05c. 1944 ADIf 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 / quote ↗
06c. 1944 ADAt times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die but do not seem to make a "problem" of it.Alan Watts / quote ↗
08c. 1944 ADThis-the immediate everyday and present experience-is IT the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.Alan Watts / quote ↗
09c. 1944 ADI have realized that the past and the future are real illusions that they exist only in the present which is what there is and all that there is.Alan Watts / quote ↗
10c. 1944 ADBut the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.Alan Watts / quote ↗
11c. 1944 ADAnd the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.Alan Watts / quote ↗
12c. 1944 ADYou don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.Alan Watts / quote ↗
13c. 1944 ADIn other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.Alan Watts / quote ↗
14c. 1944 ADReligion is not a department of life it is something that enters into the whole of it.Alan Watts / quote ↗
15c. 1944 ADIn known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.Alan Watts / quote ↗
16c. 1944 ADBut to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.Alan Watts / quote ↗
17c. 1944 ADZen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.Alan Watts / quote ↗
18c. 1944 ADThe style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.Alan Watts / quote ↗
19c. 1944 ADThe religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.Alan Watts / quote ↗
20c. 1944 ADBut at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.Alan Watts / quote ↗
21c. 1944 ADHow 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 / quote ↗
22c. 1944 ADThe reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.Alan Watts / quote ↗
23c. 1944 ADYou are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.Alan Watts / quote ↗