Top 36 Alan M 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. Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
Alan W. Watts
#3. I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.
Alan W. Watts
#4. For a decision-the freest of my actions just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.
Alan Watts
#5. Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.
Alan W. Watts
#6. How did you know you're alive, unless you'd once been dead?
Alan Watts
#7. To feel life is meaningless unless "I" can be permanent is like having desperately fallen in love with an inch.
Alan Watts
#8. 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
#9. What keeps us from happiness is our inability to fully inhabit the present
Alan Watts
#10. The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
Alan W. Watts
#11. The structure of your organism, of your senses and nerves, endows the world with all its sensible and measurable properties - for rocks cannot seem to be hard except in relation to soft skin.
Alan W. Watts
#12. The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.
Alan Watts
#13. The highest to which man can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content; nothing higher can it give him, and nothing further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit.
Alan W. Watts
#14. Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
Alan W. Watts
#15. Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be
Alan Watts
#16. [Alan] Watts did two main things for me. He opened up the connections between what I was doing and the traditional Oriental philosophies. And he pointed me toward the distinction between Self and Mind.
Werner Erhard
#17. A man does not really begin to be alive until he has lost himself, until he has released the anxious grasp which he normally holds upon his life, his property, his reputation and position.
Alan W. Watts
#18. We suffer from the delusion that the entire universe is held in order by the categories of human thought, fearing that if we do not hold to them with the utmost tenacity, everything will vanish into chaos. We
Alan W. Watts
#19. Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.
Alan W. Watts
#20. 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
#21. The fools standpoint is that all social institutions are games. He sees the whole world as game playing. That's why, when people take their games seriously and take on stern and pious expressions, the fool gets the giggles because he knows that it is all a game.
Alan Watts
#22. 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
#23. All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head.
Alan Watts
#24. The harder we try to catch hold of the moment, to seize a pleasant sensation ... , the more elusive it becomes ... It is like trying to clutch water in one's hands - the harder one grips, the faster it slips through one's fingers.
Alan Watts
#25. We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can't slow down enough to enjoy them when they come.
Alan Watts
#26. 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
#27. Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.
Alan Watts
#28. You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
Alan Watts
#29. Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
Alan W. Watts
#30. Altough we all realize that monotony is boring, almost every form of industrial work- banking, accounting, mass-producing, service- is monotonous, and most people are paid for simply putting up with monotony
Alan Watts
#31. Almost all civilized peoples have been brought up to think of themselves as ghosts in machines,
Alan W. Watts
#32. you can only know God through an open mind just as you can only see the sky through a clear window. You will not see the sky if you have covered the glass with blue paint. But
Alan W. Watts
#33. Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery.
Alan Watts
#34. All I'm saying is that minerals are just a rudimentary form of consciousness whereas the other people are saying that consciousness is a complicated form of minerals.
Alan Watts
#35. We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.
Alan Watts
#36. The heaven and earth afford me no shelter at all; I'm glad, unreal are body and soul. Welcome thy weapon, O warrior of Yuen! Thy trusty steel, That flashes lightning, cuts the wind of Spring, I feel.
Alan W. Watts
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