The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Alan W. Watts

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

oneness, technology, universe

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

oneness, universe

To look at life without words is not to lose the ability to form words- to think, remember, and plan. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam. It is the same with thinking, which is really silent talking. It is not, by itself, open to the discovery of anything new, for its only novelties are simply arrangements of old words and ideas.

discovery, silence

To notice is to select, toregard some bits of perception, or some features of the world, as morenoteworthy, more significant, than others. To these we attend, and therest we ignore—for which reason conscious attention is at the same time ignorance despite the fact that it gives us a vividlyclear picture of whatever we choose to notice.

attention, ignorance, philosophy

There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.

For our radically misnamed “materialistic” civilization must above all cultivate the love of material, of earth, air, and water, of mountains and forests, of excellent food and imaginative housing and clothing, and of cherishing our artfully erotic contacts between human bodies. Certainly, all these so–called “things” are as impermanent as ripples in water, but what life, what love, what energy is there in a perfectly pure abstraction or a totally solid and eternally indestructible rock?

alan-wa, humorous, inspirational-quotes

We fail so easily to see the difference between fear of the unknown and respect for the unknown, thinking that those who do not hasten in with bright lights and knives are deterred by a holy and superstitious fear. Respect for the unknown is the attitude of those who, instead of raping nature, woo her until she gives herself. But what she gives, even then, is not the cold clarity of the surface but the warm inwardness of the body – a mysteriousness which is not merely a negation, a blank absence of knowledge, but that positive substance which we call wonderfull.

fear, liberation, mystery, nature, respect, unknown

Camus said there is only really one serious philosophical question, which is whether or not to commit suicide. I think there are four or five serious philosophical questions:The first one is: Who started it?The second is: Are we going to make it?The third is: Where are we going to put it?The fourth is: Who’s going to clean up?And the fifth: Is it serious?Out Of Your Mind (2004), Audio lecture 1: The Nature of Consciousness: A Game That’s Worth The Candle.

humor, philosophical, questions, suicide

The answer to the problem of suffering is not away from the problem but in it. The inevitability of pain will not be met by deadening sensitivity but by increasing it, by exploring and feeling out the manner in which the natural organism itself wants to react and which its innate wisdom has provided.

liberation, pain, suffering

We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we’re in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back form the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see its like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that…Also watch the flow of music. The melody as its expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence…you wait till later to find out what the sentence means…The present is always changing the past.

changing, meaning, past, present

And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words… As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.

meaning, meaninglessness, the-way-of-liberation

If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself – not as a stranger in the world, not as something here unprobational, not as something that has arrived here by fluke – but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.

inspirational, life, self