Alan Watts Quotes About Giving

Quotes about: Giving

• To go out of your mind once a day is tremendously important, because by going out of your mind you come to your senses. And if you stay in your mind all of the time, you are over rational, in other words you are like a very rigid bridge which because it has no give; no craziness in it, is going to be blown down by the first hurricane.

  Alan Watts

  Bridges, Giving, Mind

• When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.

  Alan Watts

  Exercise, Giving, Human Nature

• We know that from time to time there arise among human beings people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.

  Alan Watts

  People, Giving, Sun

  Alan W. Watts (2011). “Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal”, p.85, Vintage

• The Highest to which people can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes them wonder, let them be content; nothing higher can it give them, and nothing further should they seek for behind it; there is the limit.

  Alan Watts

  People, Giving, Limits

• Substances like LSD, which give away a secret about the nature of the social game - the human game and what underlies it - are potentially dangerous, of course, like any good thing is. Electricity is dangerous, fire is dangerous, cars are dangerous, planes are dangerous, but not so dangerous as driving on the freeway. The only way to handle danger is to face it. If you start getting frightened of it, then you make it worse. Because you project onto it all kinds of bogeys and threats which don't exist in it at all.

  Alan Watts

  Fire, Games, Giving

• The psychotherapist ... tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to be in the world (of social convention) but not of the world.

  Alan Watts

  Giving, Community, Trying

  "Psychotherapy, East and West" by Alan Watts, (p. 7), 1961.

• We have allowed brain thinking to develop and dominate our lives.
  As a consequence, we are at war within ourselves.
  The brain desiring things which the body does not want, and the body desiring things which the brain does not allow; the brain giving directions which the body will not follow, and the body giving impulses which the brain cannot

  Alan Watts

  War, Thinking, Giving

  Alan Watts (1951). “The Wisdom of Insecurity”, Vintage

• Our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don't learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life.

  Alan Watts

  Educational, Clothes, Giving

• Here's an example: someone says, "Master, please hand me the knife," and he hands them the knife, blade first. "Please give me the other end," he says. And the master replies, "What would you do with the other end?" This is answering an everyday matter in terms of the metaphysical. When the question is, "Master, what is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?" Then he replies, "There is enough breeze in this fan to keep me cool." That is answering the metaphysical in terms of the everyday, and that is, more or less, the principle zen works on. The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.

  Alan Watts

  Buddhism, Hands, Knives

  Alan Watts (2010). “What Is Zen?”, p.29, New World Library

• If the human race develops an electronic nervous system, outside the bodies of individual people, thus giving us all one mind and one global body, this is almost precisely what has happened in the organization of cells which compose our own bodies. We have already done it. [...] If all this ends with the human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns, why should that trouble us? For that is exactly what we are now!

  Alan Watts

  Race, Cells, Organization

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.34, Souvenir Press

• For we have never actually understood the revolutionary sense beneath them – the incredible truth that what religion calls the vision of God is found in giving up any belief in the idea of God.

  Alan Watts

  Giving Up, Ideas, Vision

  Alan Watts (1951). “The Wisdom of Insecurity”, Vintage

• What is the next step, the practical application? —I will answer that the absolutely vital thing is to consolidate your understanding, to become capable of enjoyment, of living in the present, and of the discipline which this involves. Without this you have nothing to give.

  Alan Watts

  Discipline, Giving, Understanding

• It seems to be the special peculiarity of human beings that they reflect: they think about thinking and know that they know. This, like other feedback systems, may lead to vicious circles and confusions if improperly managed, but self-awareness makes human experience resonant. It imparts that simultaneous "echo" to all that we think and feel as the box of a violin reverberates with the sound of the strings. It gives depth and volume to what would otherwise be shallow and flat.

  Alan Watts

  Thinking, Echoes, Self

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin