The Tao of Philosophy Quotes

“When you look at the clouds they are not symmetrical. They do not form fours and they do not come along in cubes, but you know at once that they are not a mess. [...] They are wiggly but in a way, orderly, although it is difficult for us to describe that kind of order. Now, take a look at yourselves. You are all wiggly. [...] We are just like clouds, rocks and stars. Look at the way the stars are arranged. Do you criticize the way the stars are arranged?”
― Alan W. Watts, The Tao of Philosophy: The Edited Transcripts

“Your hair grows by itself, your heart beats by itself, and your breath happens pretty much by itself. Your glands secrete the essences by themselves and you do not have voluntary control over these things, and so we say they happen spontaneously. So, when you go to bed and try to go to sleep you interfere with the spontaneous process of going to sleep. If you try to breathe real hard you will find you get balled-up in your breathing. So if you are to be human, you just have to trust yourself to go to sleep, to digest your food, and to have bowel movements. Of course if something goes seriously wrong and you need a surgeon that is another matter, but by and large the healthy human being does not from the start of life need surgical interference. One lets it happen by itself, and so with the whole picture that is fundamental to it. You have to let go and let it happen, because if you don’t then you are constantly going to be trying to do what happens easily only if you do not try. When you think a bit about what people really want to do with their time, and you ask what they do when they are not being pushed around or somebody is telling them what to do, you find they like to make rhythms. They listen to music and they dance or they sing, or perhaps they do something of a rhythmic nature like playing cards, bowling, or raising their elbows. Given the chance, everybody wants to spend their time swinging.”
― Alan W. Watts, Tao of Philosophy

“A great Zen master said just before he died, "From the bathtub, to the bathtub, I have uttered stuff and nonsense." The bathtub in which the baby is washed at birth, the bathtub in which the corpse is washed before burial, all this time I have said much nonsense.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Tao of Philosophy: The Edited Transcripts

“If life is serious, then of course I must survive. If it is not serious, it really does not matter whether I do or not.”
― Alan W. Watts, Tao of Philosophy

“However, until there is silence of the mind, it is almost impossible to understand eternal life, that is to say, eternal now.”
― Alan W. Watts, Tao of Philosophy

“However, when you say to yourself, “I must go on living,” you put yourself in a double bind because you submit to a process which is essentially spontaneous and then insist it must happen.”
― Alan W. Watts, Tao of Philosophy

“up.” The Native Americans laugh at the “palefaces” because they say, “The paleface does not know when he is hungry until he looks at his watch.” So in this way we become clock-dominated, and the abstract system takes over from the physical, organic situation. As a result, we have run into a cultural situation where we have confused the symbol with the physical reality, the money with the wealth, the menu with the dinner, and as a result we are starving from eating menus.”
― Alan W. Watts, Tao of Philosophy

“Now let us suppose that we are going to try to do the impossible and become, as it were, completely transparent to ourselves. What happens when we entirely understand the organization or the mechanics of our own brains? Well, you are again back in the situation of God, and when you are God what are you going to do? If you are God you know what you are going to do: you are going to say to yourself, “Get lost.” What you want is a surprise, and when you have figured everything out there will be no more surprises, and then you will be completely bored. But on the other hand, a person”
― Alan W. Watts, Tao of Philosophy

“In keeping with the old principle of triangulation, you cannot establish the position of a particular object unless you observe it from two particularly different points of view, and thereby calculate its actual distance from you.”
― Alan W. Watts, Tao of Philosophy

“Now it is my contention and my basic metaphysical axiom that existence—the physical universe—is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It is not going anywhere; that is to say, it does not have some destination at which it ought to arrive. It is best understood by analogy with music because music as an art form is essentially playful. We say, “You play the piano.” You do not work the piano.”
― Alan W. Watts, Tao of Philosophy

“For example, in the science of ecology one learns that a human being is not an organism in an environment, but is an organism/environment, that is to say, a unified field of behavior. If you describe carefully the behavior of any organism you cannot do so without at the same time describing the behavior of the environment, and by that you know that what you are describing is the behavior of a unified field.”
― Alan W. Watts, Tao of Philosophy

“It is this participation in the essential glorious nonsense that is at the heart of the world, not necessarily going anywhere. It seems that only in moments of unusual insight and illumination that we get the point of this, and find that the true meaning of life is no meaning, that its purpose is no purpose, and that its sense is non-sense.”
― Alan W. Watts, Tao of Philosophy

“Why does He create the universe? What is the content of the love of God for His creation? Well, we have the frank answer of the Hindus that the godhead manifests the world because of lila, which is Sanskrit for “play.”
― Alan W. Watts, Tao of Philosophy

“However, when we do not grasp, we have the attitude of faith. If you let go of all the idols you will of course discover that what this unknown is, which is the foundation of the universe, is precisely you.”
― Alan W. Watts, Tao of Philosophy

“He learns the art of “letting things happen,” which is no mere passivity but, on the contrary, a creative technique familiar to the activity of many artists, musicians, and inventors in our own culture, whereby skill and insight are found to be the fruits of a certain “dynamic” relaxation.”
― Alan W. Watts, Tao of Philosophy