There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it.
Alan WattsOur pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure โ attractively packaged but inferior in content.
Alan WattsIf you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.
Alan WattsSomeone once described โChristian Secularismโ as the assumption that there is nothing at all to life except a pilgrimage between the maternity ward and the crematorium, and that it is within that span that Christian concern must be exercised because that is all there is.
Alan WattsWe feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision. But if a decision itself were voluntary every decision would have to be preceded by a decision to decide - An infinite regression which fortunately does not occur. Oddly enough, if we had to decide to decide, we would not be free to decide
Alan WattsTo know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely with this universe. You feel profoundly rooted in it and connected with it. You feel, in other words, that the whole energy, which expresses itself in the galaxies, is intimate. It is not something to which you are a stranger, but it is that with which you, whatever it is, are intimately bound up. That in your seeing, your hearing, your talking, your thinking, your moving, you express that which it is that moves the sun and other stars.
Alan Watts