Alan Watts

It's like your breath: it goes in and out, in and out, and if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible. It's also like the game of hide-and-seek, because it's always fun to find new ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn't always hide in the same place.

salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves

But in practice we are all bewitched by words. We confuse them with the real world, and try to live in the real world as if it were the world of words.

Religion wants to assure the future beyond death, and science wants to assure it until death, and to postpone death.

The miracles of technology cause us to live in a hectic, clockwork world that does violence to human biology, enabling us to do nothing but pursue the future faster and faster.

Money is the perfect symbol of all such desires, being a mere symbol of real wealth, and to make it one’s goal is the most blatant example of confusing measurements with reality.

Similarly, to cross a river you need a boat, but when you have reached the other side, you do not pick up the boat and carry it across the land on your back. The brick, the boat, the scaffolding, all represent religious technology, or method, and in the end these are all to disappear.

A person who is a master in Zen is called buji, which means “no business, no affectation, nothing special.”

Buddhists believe in this kind of supreme god, but they do not believe that that god is particularly important

Buddhists believe in this kind of supreme god, but they do not believe that that god is particularly important.