Alan Watts

Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.

This is the real secret of life - to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve in quality as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing it is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

Saints need sinners.

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.

We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible.

We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.