Best Alan Watts Quotes
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
— Alan Watts
I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
— Alan Watts
But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
— Alan Watts
You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
— Alan Watts
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
— Alan Watts
You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.
— Alan Watts
No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
— Alan Watts
But I’ll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything.
— Alan Watts
No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
— Alan Watts
So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.
— Alan Watts
Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.
— Alan Watts
The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.
— Alan Watts
Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
— Alan Watts
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.
— Alan Watts
Saints need sinners.
— Alan Watts
Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
— Alan Watts
Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
— Alan Watts
A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
— Alan Watts
And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.
— Alan Watts
I owe my solitude to other people.
— Alan Watts
So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.
— Alan Watts
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.
— Alan Watts
Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it’s just doing it.
— Alan Watts
Faith is a state of openness or trust.
— Alan Watts
What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it’s a drag? But you see, that’s what people do.
— Alan Watts
But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.
— Alan Watts
So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.
— Alan Watts
But to me nothing – the negative, the empty – is exceedingly powerful.
— Alan Watts
Unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax.
— Alan Watts
You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.
— Alan Watts
The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.
— Alan Watts
The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
— Alan Watts
The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.
— Alan Watts
The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.
— Alan Watts
But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.
— Alan Watts
We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.
— Alan Watts
Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.
— Alan Watts
In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.
— Alan Watts
Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.
— Alan Watts
Wars based on principle are far more destructive… the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.
— Alan Watts
The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.
— Alan Watts
And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment.
— Alan Watts
The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it – aliens.
— Alan Watts
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.
— Alan Watts
If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.
— Alan Watts
Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.
— Alan Watts
Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
— Alan Watts
Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
— Alan Watts
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.
— Alan Watts
If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself – so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed.
— Alan Watts
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
— Alan Watts
The only Zen you’ll find on mountain tops is the Zen you bring up there with you.
— Alan Watts
We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.
— Alan Watts
We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
— Alan Watts
There will always be suffering. But we must not suffer over the suffering.
— Alan Watts
One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.
— Alan Watts
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
— Alan Watts
The menu is not the meal.
— Alan Watts
Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
— Alan Watts
Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present.
— Alan Watts
There is no other reality than present reality… even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.
— Alan Watts
Philosophy is man’s expression of curiosity about everything and his attempt to make sense of the world primarily through his intellect.
— Alan Watts
Society is our extended mind and body.
— Alan Watts
Alan Watts Quotes About Love
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
— Alan Watts
But this is the most powerful thing that can be done: surrender. See. And love is an act of surrender to another person.
— Alan Watts
Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.
— Alan Watts
When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of… Nothing is left but to love.
— Alan Watts
To live, and to love, you have to take risks. There will be disappointments and failures and disasters as a result of taking these risks. But in the long run it will work out.
— Alan Watts
The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.
— Alan Watts
The more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love.
— Alan Watts
Alan Watts Quotes About Life
Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.
— Alan Watts
The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.
— Alan Watts
Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up… now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.
— Alan Watts
Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.
— Alan Watts
We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean ‘waves,’ the universe ‘peoples.’ Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.
— Alan Watts
When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.
— Alan Watts
It’s better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing, than a long life spent in a miserable way.
— Alan Watts
The art of living… is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
— Alan Watts
Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
— Alan Watts
Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree.
— Alan Watts
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
— Alan Watts
Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.
— Alan Watts
Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.
— Alan Watts
What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.
— Alan Watts
Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
— Alan Watts
