Alan Watts Quotes

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.

It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

he threw up his hands and wrote the Universe dont exist and died to prove it

Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?

If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.

Everything is nothing, with a twist.

Where any answer is possible, all answers are meaningless.

The purpose of existence is to exist. It is too fantastic to have a meaning.

There is no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it.

What a pity that 'nothingness' has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!

Sed nescio quo modo nihil tam absurde dici potest quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosphorum. (There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.)

He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe. Which was going to be hard, because there wasn't one.

I like both slapstick and contradiction. Like philosophers.

None of it meant anything, and all of it was important.

Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters.

I conclude that there is as much sense in nonsense as there is nonsense in sense.

Nothing ever happened - Not even this

The grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning.

One must always do what one really cannot.

But he had hardly felt the absurdity of those things, on the one hand, and the necessity of those others, on the other, (for it is rare that the feeling of absurdity is not followed by the feeling of necessity), when he felt the absurdity of those things of which he had just felt the necessity (for it is rare that the feeling of necessity is not followed by the feeling of absurdity.)

I mean, say that you figure that everything is senseless, then it can't be quite senseless because you are aware that it's senseless and your awareness of senselessness almost gives it sense. You know what I mean?

Nothing really matters except a few things that really don't matter very much.

Perhaps Kafka laughed when he told stories [. . . ] because one isn't always equal to oneself.

The trouble with talking about irony is, it's such a slippery thing that the second you start talking about it, you're a better example of it than you are an analyst.