Top 100 Alan W. Watts Quotes
#1. Paradox as it may seem, we likewise find life meaningful only when we have seen that it is without purpose, and know the "mystery of the universe" only when we are convinced that we know nothing about it at all.
Alan W. Watts
#2. I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.
Alan W. Watts
#3. The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
Alan W. Watts
#4. The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
Alan W. Watts
#5. To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.
Alan W. Watts
#6. Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
Alan W. Watts
#7. It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.
Alan W. Watts
#8. [A] certain amount of "sitting just to sit" might well be the best thing in the world for the jittery minds and agitated bodies [...].
Alan W. Watts
#9. Such questions as "Why this universe?" are a kind of intellectual neurosis, a
misuse of words in that the question sounds sensible but is actually as
meaningless as asking "Where is this universe?
Alan W. Watts
#10. The problem is to appreciate differences in the basic premises of thought and in the very methods of thinking, and these are so often overlooked that our interpretations of Chinese philosophy are apt to be a projection of characteristically Western ideas into Chinese terminology.
Alan W. Watts
#11. In a relativistic universe you don't cling to anything, you learn to swim. And you know what swimming is - it's kind of a relaxed attitude with the water. In which you don't keep yourself afloat by holding the water, but by a certain giving to it.
Alan W. Watts
#12. How can a republic be the best form of government if the universe, heaven and hell are all a monarchy?
Alan W. Watts
#13. If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.
Alan W. Watts
#14. We see it as an eternal arena in which the individual is no more than a temporary stranger - a visitor who hardly belongs - for the thin ray of consciousness does not shine upon its own source. In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself - through our eyes and IT's.
Alan W. Watts
#15. When each moment becomes an expectation life is deprived of fulfillment, and death is dreaded for it seems that here expectation must come to an end.
Alan W. Watts
#16. We know that from time to time, there arise among human beings, people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.
Alan W. Watts
#17. The person who is constantly anxious is the person who is resisting the flip-flopability of things.
Alan W. Watts
#18. Philosophers, for example, often fail to recognize that their remarks about the universe apply also to themselves and their remarks. If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so.
Alan W. Watts
#19. Indeed, one of the highest pleasures is to be more or less unconscious of one's own existence, to be absorbed in interesting sights, sounds, places, and people. Conversely, one of the greatest pains is to be self-conscious, to feel unabsorbed and cut off from the community and the surrounding world.
Alan W. Watts
#20. If a man seeks the Buddha, that man loses the Buddha.
Alan W. Watts
#21. Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.
Alan W. Watts
#22. There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.
Alan W. Watts
#23. For the trouble with our rich and powerful people is not so much that they are wicked, but that they do not enjoy themselves.
Alan W. Watts
#24. When you confer spiritual authority on another person, you must realize that you are allowing them to pick your pocket and sell you your own watch. How
Alan W. Watts
#25. [F]ast intercommunication between points is making all points the same point.
Alan W. Watts
#26. To practice with an end in view is to have one eye on the practice and the other on the end, which is lack of concentration, lack of sincerity.
Alan W. Watts
#27. If we are open only to discoveries which will accord with what we know already, we may as well stay shut.
Alan W. Watts
#28. I want to contrast this ceramic image of the world with the distinctly different dramatic image that is the presiding image of the Hindus. Their idea is that God did not make the world, but acted it. That is to say, every person and every thing is a role or part that the Godhead is playing.
Alan W. Watts
#29. Death seems simply to be a return to that unknown inwardness out of which we were born ... the truly inward source of one's life was never born ... Outwardly I am one apple among many. Inwardly I am the tree.
Alan W. Watts
#30. It seems that if I am afraid, then I am "stuck" with fear. But in fact I am chained to the fear only so long as I am trying to get away from it. On the other hand, when I do not try to get away I discover that there is nothing "stuck" or fixed about the reality of the moment.
Alan W. Watts
#31. For to define is to isolate, to separate some complex of forms from the stream of life and say, "This is I." When man can name and define himself, he feels that he has an identity. Thus he begins to feel, like the word, separate and static, as over against the real, fluid world of nature.
Alan W. Watts
#32. It seems obvious that the universe is a system which, by means of living bodies, becomes aware of itself - up to a point.
Alan W. Watts
#33. 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 W. Watts
#34. The truth is that people who live for the future are, as we say of the insane, "not quite all there" - or here: by overeagerness they are perpetually missing the point. Foresight is bought at the price of anxiety, and, when overused, it destroys all its own advantages. The
Alan W. Watts
#35. It is both dangerous and absurd for our world to be a group of communions mutually excommunicate.
Alan W. Watts
#37. Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
Alan W. Watts
#38. There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.
Alan W. Watts
#39. It just happens, and all happenings are mutually interdependent in a way that seems unbelievably harmonious.
Alan W. Watts
#40. You may think there's no point in singing unless you are good at it, but that is like saying there is no point in doing anything at all unless you are particularly gifted at it, which is ridiculous.
Alan W. Watts
#42. 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 W. Watts
#43. Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.
Alan W. Watts
#44. For if you know what you want, and will be content with it, you can be trusted. But if you do not know, your desires are limitless and no one can tell how to deal with you. Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.
Alan W. Watts
#45. Time itself is a creation of the restless mind; space has been created by the same mind to give itself room to wander when in fact there is no space beyond a mental construct that, like all constructs, eventually turns into a prison.
Alan W. Watts
#46. People become concerned with being more humble than other people.
Alan W. Watts
#47. People try to accept themselves in order to be different, and try to surrender themselves in order to have more self-respect in their own eyes - or
Alan W. Watts
#48. The most basic Buddhist stance: sober examination of what lies before you, leaving aside all assumptions.
Alan W. Watts
#49. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
Alan W. Watts
#50. Life, like getting an erection, is a spontaneous process which collapses when one tries to force it to happen.
Alan W. Watts
#51. To define means to fix, and, when you get down to it, real life isn't fixed.
Alan W. Watts
#52. On the one hand there is myself, and on the other the rest of the universe. I am not rooted in the earth like a tree. I rattle around independently. I seem to be the center of everything, and yet cut off and alone.
Alan W. Watts
#53. Actually, the world is not complex. It is the task of trying to figure it out with words or numbers that is complex.
Alan W. Watts
#54. You're under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.
Alan W. Watts
#55. There is another story of a Chinese sage who was asked, "How shall we escape the heat?" - meaning, of course, the heat of suffering. He answered, "Go right into the middle of the fire." "But how, then, shall we escape the scorching flame?" "No further pain will trouble you!
Alan W. Watts
#56. Life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself. In this moment it is finished.
Alan W. Watts
#57. The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from the giant pine, which lives for a thousand years.
Alan W. Watts
#58. We do not dance to reach a certain point on the floor, but simply to dance. Energy itself, as William Blake said, is eternal delight - and all life is to be lived in the spirit of rapt absorption in an arabesque of rhythms.
Alan W. Watts
#59. What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like?
Alan W. Watts
#60. Doctors try to get rid of their patients - clergymen try to get them hooked on the medicine so that they will become addicts to the church.
Alan W. Watts
#61. Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
Alan W. Watts
#62. Moreover, there is no "unconscious" mind distinct from the conscious, for the "unconscious" mind is conscious, though not of itself, just as the eyes see but do not see themselves.
Alan W. Watts
#63. Real freedom cannot exist alongside false freedom, but the abandonment of false freedom looks as if it would leave you as good as dead. But this is the secret of Goethe's Stirb und werde, "Die and come to life." For the job of compassion in a sick society only the dead need apply.
Alan W. Watts
#64. Evil" read backwards is "live." Demon est deus inversus.
Alan W. Watts
#65. Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown.
Alan W. Watts
#66. What will happen to me when I die is, after all, like asking what happens to my fist when I open my hand
Alan W. Watts
#67. Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery
the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets
is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.
Alan W. Watts
#68. Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated
Alan W. Watts
#69. The paradox about waking up - I mean the ordinary kind of waking up that occurred to you and me this morning - is that you can't make it happen, yet it's inevitable. The same holds true spiritually. You can't wish, pray, beg, force, or meditate yourself awake.
Alan W. Watts
#70. Who believe more firmly in the Devil than in God are always afraid that if they let go, the Devil will take over first, unaware that not having let go is the Devil already in full control.
Alan W. Watts
#71. It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about I.
Alan W. Watts
#72. A monk asked Ts'ui-wei, "For what reason did the First Patriarch come from the West?" Ts'ui-wei answered, "Pass me that chin-rest." As soon as the monk passed it, Ts'ui-wei hit him with it.20
Alan W. Watts
#73. Like words, memories never really succeed in "catching" reality.
Alan W. Watts
#74. In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.
Alan W. Watts
#75. Read Theodore Schwenk's marvelous book Sensitive Chaos (London, Rudolph Steiner Press, 1965),
Alan W. Watts
#76. You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
Alan W. Watts
#77. 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 W. Watts
#78. One's life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If one is paranoid, the other is metanoid.
Alan W. Watts
#79. To "know" reality you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, and feel it.
Alan W. Watts
#80. Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word water is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.
Alan W. Watts
#81. I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.
Alan W. Watts
#83. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To "have" running water you must let go of it and let it run. The same is true of life and of God. The
Alan W. Watts
#84. (Perpetual leaves are, as we know, made of plastic, and there may come a time when surgeons will be able to replace all our organs with plastic substitutes, so that you will achieve immortality by becoming a plastic model of yourself.)
Alan W. Watts
#85. So, according to Vedanta, the central doctrine of Hinduism, all bodies are the clothes of the one and only Self in its innumerable disguises, and the whole universe is a masquerade ball pretending to be a tragedy and then realizing that it's a ball.
Alan W. Watts
#86. Indeed, the power of words has gone to man's head in more than one way. To define has come to mean almost the same thing as to understand.
Alan W. Watts
#87. What is the next step, the practical application?
- I will answer that the
absolutely vital thing is to consolidate your understanding, to become
capable of enjoyment, of living in the present, and of the discipline
which this involves. Without this you have nothing to give.
Alan W. Watts
#88. Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home.
Alan W. Watts
#89. 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.
Alan W. Watts
#90. The brush must draw by itself. This cannot happen if one does not practice constantly. But neither can it happen if one makes an effort.
Alan W. Watts
#91. The sins after the Devil's heart are the intricacies of spiritual pride, the mazes of self-deception, and the subtle mockeries of hypocrisy where mask hides behind mask behind mask and reality is lost altogether.
Alan W. Watts
#92. 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 W. Watts
#93. Idolatry is not the use of images, but confusing them with what they represent, and in this respect mental images and lofty abstractions can be more insidious than bronze idols
Alan W. Watts
#95. Trying not to grasp is the same thing as to grasp since it's motivation is the same, my urgent desire to save my self from a difficulty. I can not get rid of this desire since it is one and the same desire as the desire to get rid of it.
Alan W. Watts
#96. And if I forget how many times I have been here,
and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light. I return in every baby born.
Alan W. Watts
#97. To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead, for as our own proverb says, To travel well is better than to arrive.
Alan W. Watts
#98. I am what happens between the maternity ward and the Crematorium
Alan W. Watts
#99. If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.
Alan W. Watts
#100. You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.
Alan W. Watts
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