Alan Watts Biography
Alan Watts is a famous English scholar, writer and speaker, known for translating Eastern languages into English. Born into a Christian family in England, he became interested in Christianity while he was a student at King’s School in Canterbury. He later attended a Zen monastery where he met many scholars and spiritual teachers who helped shape his thinking.
A good writer started writing at the age of fourteen. Many of his early works were published in Lodge journals.
At the age of twenty-three he immigrated to the United States, first as a Zen teacher, and then left without becoming a king. Allen then studied Christian scriptures and served as a pastor in Chicago for six years before moving to San Francisco to pursue a professional education. At the same time, he began to give lectures on Eastern philosophy, which soon won him a wide audience at home and abroad. He left behind an audio library of nearly 400 presentations and more than 25 publications.
Alan Watts Quotes
“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.”- Alan Watts
“But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be. “- Alan Watts
” 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. “- Alan Watts
” The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention. “- Alan Watts
” Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe. “- Alan Watts
” 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. “- Alan Watts
” The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it’s only money… they don’t know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination. “- Alan Watts
” Unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. “- Alan Watts
” A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world. “- Alan Watts
” The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present. “- Alan Watts
” And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on. “- Alan Watts
” But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is. “- Alan Watts
” Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it. “- Alan Watts
” The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.”- Alan Watts
” Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver. “- Alan Watts
” The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe. “- Alan Watts
” 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. “- Alan Watts