Alan Watts Quotes

Awareness is becoming acquainted with environment, no matter where one happens to be.

Of the Logos which is as I describe it men always prove to be uncomprehending, both before they have heard it and when once they have heard it. For although all things happen according to this Logos, they [men] are like people of no experience, even when they experience such words and deeds as I explain, when I distinguish each thing according to its constitution and declare how it is; but the rest of men fail to notice what they do after they wake up just as they forget what they do when asleep.

The fish will be the last to discover water.

Fish don't know much about water, and people didn't know much about air.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'

People are all ignorant, they fear new things, they fear knowledge somehow, I don't know why. Everything that I ever learned was always so great. I never thought so at the time, it was just that little bit more in your mind an expansion of consciousness or awareness.

Space and time are "sensed" not seen. They are created in consciousness which is spaceless and timeless.

I'm not aware of too many things, I know what I know, if you know what I mean.

You can tell by looking at most people that the world remains a stone to them and a closed door.

Most people have a time-bound awareness. And the reason is they have sacrificed their self for their self-image.

He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later.

Fish are not the best authority on water.

The problem with people who say monsters don't really exist is that they're almost never saying it to the monsters." —Alice Healy

One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

The highest knowledge is to know that we are surrounded by mystery.

A man receives only what he is ready to receive... The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest of what he has observed, he does not observe.

If y'can't see with yore own two eyes what's in front of them, then y'better off closin' 'em an' goin' t'sleep, 'tis far more restful! —Gerul

Most people do not take heed of the things they encounter, nor do they grasp them even when they have learned about them, although they suppose they do.

Ignorance is not bliss. Bliss is knowing the full meaning of what you have been given.

It's a wonderful thing to perceive the world and to interact with it and with other people and nature from that deep place of utter stillness, where the compulsion to immediately label and interpret whatever arises around you is no longer there.

Knowledge is the barrier to knowing. When knowledge is dropped, knowing flowers.

You can't be conscious unless you have variable receptors... When people say the way I see the world is the way it is - that's ridiculous. We can only see it depending on the quality of our receptors and background.

Time and space are just projections of your consciousness.

Once you realize something, then you can't pretend you don't know it any more.

There is an Indian fable of three beings who drank from a river: one was a god, and he drank ambrosia; one was a man, and he drank water; and one was a demon, and he drank filth. What you get is a function of your own consciousness.