Alan Watts

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

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

Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up… now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.

If you really understand Zen, you can use any book, even the dictionary, because the sound of the rain needs no translation.

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.

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

Now payback is a bad bitch and baby, I’m the baddest.

Are people more violently opposed to fur rather than leather because its much easier to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs?

Since when is “public safety” the root password to the Constitution?

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.

My entire life can be described in one sentence. It didn’t go as planned and that’s OK.

It’s terribly unfair that we should have to suffer like this.

Life experiences, mental illness, drugs, greed, environment, and poor role-modeling can all forge damaged people and can generate a darkness, an exploitiveness, in the way they approach life. Whatever their genesis, there are people in your life (and mine) who will hurt you if you let them.

I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.

I never apologize. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way I am.

At this very moment, you may be saying to yourself that you have any number of admirable qualities. You are a loyal friend, a caring person, someone who is smart, dependable, fun to be around. That’s wonderful, and I’m happy for you, but let me ask you this: are you being any of those things to yourself?

Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.

Sometimes you have to make the right decision, and sometimes you have to make the decision right.

There have been times when I’ve been around people I wouldn’t care to be around, and if I could get away I would. We have a word in Mississippi – we just don’t seem to set horses. In other words, this person is always saying something that gets your goat, y’understand? But when people treat you mean, you dislike them for that, but not because of their person, who they are. I was born and raised in a segregated society, but when I left there I had nobody I disliked other than the people that’d mistreated me, and that only lasted for as long as they were mistreating me.

Life is a helluva lot more fun if you say yes rather than no.