Alan Watts Quotes

All theological lore is becoming distasteful to me.

The idea of Jehovah was born here... Out of the rude elements of the insignificant thoughts thoughts that are in all men, they reared the transcendent conception of a God.

My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.

The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world.

The uninitiated have real questions and valid concerns over how the things of God appear to them.

But after he was pleased to reveal himself to me I did presently, like Abraham, run to Hagar. And after that he did let me see the atheism of my own heart, for which I begged of the Lord that it might not remain in my heart.

Longing is like the rosy dawn. After the dawn out comes the sun. Longing is followed by the vision of God.

Any person seasoned with a just sense of the imperfections of natural reason, will fly to revealed truth with the greatest avidity.

Actually, I began to think that maybe there is a god, after all. Or maybe it's a different one. The old one got fired.

Religion can be one of the greatest impediments to finding God.

For those whose faith has faded, the reasons may be real to them, but these reasons do not change the reality of what Joseph Smith restored.

'Long Black Train' was inspired by a vision that I had of a long, black train running down this track way out in the middle of nowhere. I could see people standing out to the sides of this track watching this train go by. As I was walking, experiencing this vision, I kept asking myself, 'What does this vision mean and what is this train?'

The eyes of the soul of the multitudes are unable to endure the vision of the divine.

As a teenager, I increasingly had questions about religion to which I found no good answers.

In certain strains of Judaism, there's a profound passion for the ineffable. Contemplation of God is meant to be forever elusive, because, you know, our tiny minds can't possibly comprehend Him. If we find ourselves comprehending Him, then we can be sure we're off track.

That man sees indeed the truth who sees that vision and creation are one.

The Bible God I deny; the Christian God I disbelieve in; but I am not rash enough to say there is no God as long as you tell me you are unprepared to define God to me.

Revealed religion had no weight with me.

The forms of thought, into which we throw our timid views of God, are but symbols of truths greater than our thoughts. Yet we may not set them aside as worthless, for they are the rungs on which we dwellers in the cave climb to the full view of the Truth, as he is.

Religious life is an encounter with the living God. Sometimes that encounter is preceded by a kind of soul-searching agony that tries desperately not to hear, runs in the opposite direction, and frantically tries to reason itself out of answering the invitation.

When a vision begins to form everything changes, including the air around me. I seem no longer to be in the same atmosphere. I feel a peacefulness and a love that are indescribable. I stand alone, and nothing worldly can touch me. I feel that I am looking down from a higher plane and wondering why others cannot see what I am seeing.

The revealed and mystic literature of mankind bears ample testimony to the fact that religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion. There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional.

Religion is the most powerful alternative to God.

I once sat on the rim of a mesa above the Rio Grande for three days and nights, trying to have a vision. I got hungry and saw God in the form of a beef pie.

When we say we begin with God, we begin with our idea of God, and our idea of God is not God. Instead, we ought to begin with God’s idea of God, and God’s idea of God is Christ