When it comes down to it, government is simply an abandonment of responsibility on the assumption that there are people, other than ourselves, who really know how to manage things. But the government, run ostensibly for the good of the people, becomes a self-serving corporation. To keep things under control it proliferates laws of ever-increasing complexity and unintelligibility, and hinders productive work by demanding so much accounting on paper that the record of what has been done becomes more important than what has actually been done. The Taoist moral is that people who mistrust themselves and one another are doomed.

— Alan W. Watts

When somebody plays music, you listen. You just follow those sounds, and eventually you understand the music. The point can't be explained in words because music is not words, but after listening for a while, you understand the point of it, and that point is the music itself. In exactly the same way, you can listen to all experiences.

— Alan W. Watts

When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of … Nothing is left but to love.

— Alan W. Watts

W might 'conquer' nature if we could first, or at the same time, conquer our own nature, though we do not see that human nature and 'outside' nature are all of a piece.

— Alan W. Watts

Working rightly, the brain is the highest form of "instinctual wisdom." Thus, it should work like the homing instinct of pigeons and the formation of the fetus in the womb - without verbalizing the process of knowing "how" it does it. The self-conscious brain, like the self-conscious heart, is a disorder, and manifests itself in the acute feeling of separation between "I" and my experience.

— Alan W. Watts

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

— Alan W. Watts

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.

— Alan W. Watts

You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.

— Alan W. Watts

You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.

— Alan W. Watts

Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

— Alan W. Watts