Alan Watts Quotes

The more accurately we search into the human mind, the stronger traces we everywhere find of his wisdom who made it.

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

I've always loved science, as far back as I can remember. I was very, very curious about how everything worked: the world, the physical universe, chemistry, law. So it was only natural to be curious about how our mind works.

I was interested in the nature of human mental processes, which is what got me interested in psychoanalysis. And it became clear to me after a while that mental processes come from the brain, and in order to understand them, you need to be a biologist of the brain.

People have wanted to look inside the human mind, the human brain, for thousands of years.

The individual is the brain, not the heart.

There is no scientific study more vital to man than the study of his own brain. Our entire view of the universe depends on it.

I love the human mind.

More may have been learned about the brain and the mind in the 1990s - the so-called decade of the brain - than during the entire previous history of psychology and neuroscience.

The only way to study the mind is to get at facts, and then intellect will arrange them and deduce the principles.

At bottom there is but one subject of study: the forms and metamorphoses of mind. All other subjects may be reduced to that; all other studies bring us back to this study.

There is so much to the human mind we don't understand. But, you see, if you have faith, you can do anything.

People often ask how I got interested in the brain; my rhetorical answer is: 'How can anyone NOT be interested in it?' Everything you call 'human nature' and consciousness arises from it.

After all my probing into the human brain, I should still be aware of mysteries and come up with them myself.

Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.

I do what I do merrily out of curiosity because I want to know how the brain works. That will get me up early in the morning and keep me going all day long.

There is something fundamentally fascinating about the mechanics, I guess, of the human body and where consciousness and mind exist, and what you can do with the mechanics of the body while keeping those intact, and where those two cross over.

Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West - but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.

No matter how closely you examine the water, glucose, and electrolyte salts in the human brain, you can't find the point where these molecules became conscious.

The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?

I want to give people theories, I want to expose them to scientific stories that force them to re-evaluate the way they use these three pounds of meat inside their head.

I'm quite interested in my own mental processes, simply because I'm a failed scientist, and because I'm interested in how the brain and the mind works, and I like to avoid easy descriptions.

Physiological psychology is, therefore, first of all psychology.