Alan Watts

You’re only making a mess by trying to put things straight. You’re trying to straighten out a wiggly world and no wonder you’re in trouble.

Relaxation is something just as elusive as happiness; it is something which no amount of self-assertive striving can obtain, for as it is in a certain sense the absence of effort, any effort to achieve it is self-defeating.

Given a universe in which anything goes, what are the most lovely, generous, and exuberant things we can do?

Go to your interstellar space situation, where it does not matter whether you live or die, and realize that state. Having realized that state, you can come back to the other states and live them with more verve.

I am, if anything, an entertainer, I love to feel that certain spark leap the gap between the speaker and the audience. But I don't have any message of world-changing nature. The world might change, but not because you're trying to change it.

We love to see a child lost in the dance and not performing for an audience. To be happy and know that you are happy is really the overflowing cup of life. To dance as if there was no audience.

Zen is above all the liberation of the mind from conventional thought, and this is something utterly different from rebellion against convention, on the one hand, or adapting foreign conventions, on the other.

The course of wisdom—what is really sensible—is to let go, is to commit oneself, to give oneself up. And that’s quite mad. So we come to the strange conclusion that in madness lies sanity.