Philosophy Quote by Alan Wilson Watts — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“I have always thought that all philosophical debates are ultimately between the partisans of structure and the partisans of "goo.”

“But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence which does not work according to plan, according to a one-at-a-time order of thought. Yet the concrete evidence of such an intelligence is right to hand in our own thoughtlessly ordered bodies. For the Tao does not 'know' how it produces the universe just as we do not 'know' how we construct our brains.”

“Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.”

“In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.”

“There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.”

“The greatest danger that always hovered over humanity, and still hovers over it, is the eruption of madness— which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing, the enjoyment of the mind's lack of discipline, the joy in human unreason.”

“And one thing we know is real: horror. It is so real, in fact, that we cannot be sure it could not exist without us. Yes, it needs our imaginations and our consciousness, but it does not ask or require our consent to use them. Indeed, horror operates with complete autonomy. Generating ontological havoc, it is mephitic foam upon which our lives merely float. And, all said, we must face up to it: horror is more real than we are.”

“Be the kind of person who catches the shit before it hits the fan, not the one who scrapes it off afterwards.”

“One can ask why the I has to appear in the cogito {Descartes’ argument “I think therefore I am.}, since the cogito, if used rightly, is the awareness of pure consciousness, not directed at any fact or action. In fact the I is not necessary here, since it is never united directly to consciousness. One can even imagine a pure and self-aware consciousness which thinks of itself as impersonal spontaneity.”

“The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.”