Dickson Watts Quotes

Fancy and humour, early and constantly indulged in, may expect an old age overrun with follies. ~ Isaac Watts

Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all it's sons away;They fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day. ~ Isaac Watts

you can only know God through an open mind just as you can only see the sky through a clear window. You will not see the sky if you have covered the glass with blue paint. But ~ Alan W. Watts

Albrecht's Law: Social innovations tend to the level of minimum tolerable well being. ~ Paul Dickson

I was just a tattletale for small minds back home. ~ Peter Watts

I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke's liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one's looking. ~ Peter Watts

Dear Lord. I give myself away. I've nothing else to give. ~ Isaac Watts

(Perpetual leaves are, as we know, made of plastic, and there may come a time when surgeons will be able to replace all our organs with plastic substitutes, so that you will achieve immortality by becoming a plastic model of yourself.) ~ Alan W. Watts

[T]he art of life is more like navigation than warfare, for what is important is to understand the winds, the tides, the currents, the seasons, and the principles of growth and decay, so that one's actions may use them and not fight them. ~ Alan W. Watts

As Chuang-tzu says, "It may be attained but not seen," or, in other words, felt but not conceived, intuited but not categorized, divined but not explained. In a similar way, air and water cannot be cut or clutched, and their flow ceases when they are enclosed. There is no way of putting a stream in a bucket or the wind in a bag. Verbal ~ Alan W. Watts

For when you see that the universe cannot be distinguished from how you act upon it, there is neither fate nor free will, self nor other. There is simply one all-inclusive Happening, in which your personal sensation of being alive occurs in just the same way as the river flowing and the stars shining far out in space. There is no question of submitting or accepting or going with it, for what happens in and as you is no different from what happens as it. ~ Alan Watts

Fictions are useful so long as they are taken as fictions. They are then
simply ways of "figuring" the world which we agree to follow so that
we can act in cooperation, as we agree about inches and hours, numbers
and words, mathematical systems and languages. If we have no
agreement about measures of time and space, I would have no way of
making a date with you at the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth
Avenue at 3 P.M. on Sunday, April 4. ~ Alan W. Watts

Life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself. In this moment it is finished. ~ Alan W. Watts

The great comfort of turning forty-nine is the realization that you are now too old to die young. ~ Paul Dickson

I would suggest that today, we know about as much concerning the human mind as we knew about the galaxy in 1300. ~ Alan Watts

Most of all, however, critics of black conservatives say we've forgotten where we came from. I may forget a federal budget number or, God forbid, to set the alarm clock for my weekly 6 a.m. flight to Washington, but I know exactly where I came from. ~ J. C. Watts

Many people think that the Bible is the authentic word of God and they worship the Bible, making it an idol ... ~ Alan Watts

Western science has made nature intelligible in terms of its symmetries and regularities, analyzing its most wayward forms into components of a regular and measurable shape. As a result we tend to see nature and to deal with it as an "order" from which the element of spontaneity has been "screened out." But this order is maya, and the "true suchness" of things has nothing in common with the purely conceptual aridities of perfect squares, circles, or triangles - except by spontaneous accident. Yet this is why the Western mind is dismayed when ordered conceptions of of the universe break down. and when the basic behavior of the physical world is found to be a "principle of uncertainty. ~ Alan W. Watts

Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word water is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism. ~ Alan W. Watts

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. ~ Alan W. Watts

It's really kind of… well, beautiful, in a way. Even the monsters, once you get to know 'em. We're all beautiful. ~ Peter Watts

We are not clear as to the role in life of these chemicals; nor are we clear as to the role of the physician. You know, of course, that in ancient times there was no clear distinction between priest and physician. ~ Alan Watts

The future is a concept, it doesn't exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is always now. That's one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now. ~ Alan Watts

I think the Republican Party should be a pro-life party. I am pro-life. I do not apologize for that. On the flip side of that coin, the Republican Party has been big enough to allow pro-choice advocates to be heard. ~ J. C. Watts

My mom once told me that my dad had given me an alliterative name, Wade Watts, because he thought it sounded like the secret identity of a superhero. Like Peter Parker or Clark Kent. ~ Ernest Cline

We have arbitrarily agreed to define the sun by the limit of its visible fire. ~ Alan W. Watts

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes. ~ Alan Watts

I write not for your farthing, but to try / How I your farthing writers, may outvie. ~ Isaac Watts

Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery. ~ Alan Watts

When a Southern woman offers you a homecooked meal, you're only rude if you refuse. That goes for seconds and thirds too, by the way." -Ruby Watts ~ Brandy Heineman

Action without wisdom, without clear awareness of the world as it really is, can never improve anything. ~ Alan W. Watts

[I]t becomes clearer and clearer that we do not live in a divided world. The harsh divisions of spirit and nature, mind and body, subject and object, controller and controlled, are seen more and more to be awkward conventions of language. These are misleading and clumsy terms for describing a world in which all events seem to be mutually interdependent[.] ~ Alan W. Watts

If we want justice for minorities and cooled wars with our natural enemies, whether human or nonhuman, we must first come to terms with the minority wand the enemy in ourselves and in our own hearts, for the rascal is there as much as anywhere in the 'external' world - especially when you realize that the world outside your skin is as much yourself as the world inside. ~ Alan Watts

You're the first person I've seen here who's actually dressed like a monk." "It's a bathrobe. ~ Peter Watts

'Tis the voice of the sluggard; I heard him complain, you have waked me too soon, I must slumber again. ~ Isaac Watts

How is an elephant like a schizophrenic?"
"I – what?"
"An elephant never forgets."
He said nothing.
"That's an AI joke," she said after a while. ~ Peter Watts

I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination. ~ Alan W. Watts

According to convention, I am not simply what I am doing now. I am also what I have done, and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost more the real "me" than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions of what I will be in the future, and so it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is! ~ Alan W. Watts