Tao for Now Quotes

“No ocean without waves, you know—it’s a dynamic system, it’s moving. And so, we are the universe waving—each one of us is it waving in a particular way.”
― Alan W. Watts, Tao for Now: Wisdom of the Watercourse

“And so the Chinese look upon the world as an organism; and therefore, it has no boss. And the word Tao refers to, not the ruler of the organism, but to the process of the organism considered as a whole; and the whole is projected in every one of its parts.”
― Alan W. Watts, Tao for Now: Wisdom of the Watercourse

“But if you get with it—in other words, you accept the situation, you flow with it—you come alive. Because you acquire courage, you’re not defending yourself all the time. You acquire energy, because you’re not all locked up, wondering what’s going to happen next. You get the capacity to take risks, and you can’t have a free people unless you are willing to take risks—it’s all gambling. So this falling apart of everything, which incidentally is what makes it alive—change is life—this is the Tao.”
― Alan W. Watts, Tao for Now: Wisdom of the Watercourse

“He tries to feel out—intuitively—what kind of action is required under these circumstances, because he feels that he can never discover it analytically, with his conscious attention alone.”
― Alan W. Watts, Tao for Now: Wisdom of the Watercourse

“And if you have your eyes really open to see people, you will see that they are all as faultless as the markings in jade or lines in marble. It’s only because you have fixed ideas of what a face ought to look like that you say someone is beautiful and someone else is ugly. But if your eyes are open, everybody is beautiful—and in fact, quite fantastic—gods and goddesses sitting around.”
― Alan Watts, Tao for Now: Wisdom of the Watercourse

“All sorts of things which we believe to be really “out there” are, as a matter of fact, conventions. For example, you know very well that you cannot tie up a parcel with the equator, because it is an imaginary line. And in exactly the same way, time (clock time) is an imaginary way of dividing and measuring motion. But it so happens that these social institutions become so convenient and so useful that we start to mistake them for the real world.”
― Alan Watts, Tao for Now: Wisdom of the Watercourse