A biography for Alan Wattshasn’t been written yet.
“The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.”
“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.”
“Saints need sinners.”
“We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.”
“No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.”
“Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.”
“The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.”
“Faith is a state of openness or trust.”
“What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.”
“But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.”
“If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.”
“The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.”
“Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.”
“The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.”
“How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.”
“I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.”
“So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.”
“So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.”
“But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.”
“I owe my solitude to other people.”