top of page
.png){kind=small}
"But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more World quotes
"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."
"Don't learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world."
"The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down."
"Fondue sets, martini shakers and juicing machines: three things the world could live completely without."
"One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other."
"One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality."
"The world is not black and white. More like black and grey."
"Cannot you conceive that another man may wish well to the world and struggle for its good on some other plan than precisely that which you have laid down?"
"What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?"
Explore more quotes by Alan Watts
"No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now."
"In 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."
"And uh, forget the money. Because, if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life wasting your time. You will be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is, in order to do things you don't like doing, which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of things you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way."
"It would seem that to be incapable of sitting and watching with the mind completely at rest is to be incapable of experiencing the world in which we live to the full. For one does not know the world simply in thinking about it and doing about it. One must first experience it more directly, and prolong the experience without jumping to conclusions."
"Not long ago Congress voted, with much patriotic rhetoric, for the imposition of severe penalties upon anyone presuming to burn the flag of the United States. Yet the very Congressmen who passed this law are responsible, by acts of commission or omission, for burning, polluting, and plundering the territory that the flag is supposed to represent. Therein, they exemplified the peculiar andperhaps fatal fallacy of civilization: the confusion of symbol with reality."
"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."
"Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive; survival -going on living- thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it; because it does not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will, to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on."
"The realm of liberation is absolutely incommensurable with the relativities of higher and lower, better and worse, gain and loss, since these are all disadvantages of the ego."
"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."
bottom of page