Alan Watts

"If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid."

"The menu is not the meal."

"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."

"God likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside of God, he has no one but himself to play with! But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear. Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself! But that's the whole fun of it-just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But- when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will WAKE UP, stop pretending, and REMEMBER that we are all one single Self- the God who is all that there is and who lives forever and ever. You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn't really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It's the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards and play again, and so it goes with the world."

"Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe."

"Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know."

"“The menu is not the meal.”"

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

"No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now."

"Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe."

"Faith is a state of openness or trust."

"You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes."

"The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination."

"How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god."

"But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is."

"The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity."

"The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe."

"Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes."

"But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful."

"In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way."