Alan Watts Life Quotes

#1. Our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don't learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life.

Alan Watts

#2. The common mistake of the religious celibate has been to suppose that the highest spiritual life absolutely demands the renunciation of sexuality, as if the knowledge of God were an alternative to the knowledge of woman, or to any other form of experience.

Alan W. Watts

#3. Human beings appear to be happy just so long as they have a future to which they can look forward - whether it be a "good time" tomorrow or an everlasting life beyond the grave.

Alan W. Watts

#4. 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

#5. No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.

Alan W. Watts

#6. What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?

Alan Watts

#7. Carried to its final extreme, the logical end of this type of reaction to life is suicide. The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead

Alan Watts

#8. Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.

Alan W. Watts

#9. Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars.

Alan Watts

#10. Life seems to be a system that eats itself to death, and in which victory equals defeat.

Alan W. Watts

#11. For there are fashions in myth, and the world-conquering West of the nineteenth century needed a philosophy of life in which realpolitik - victory for the tough people who face the bleak facts - was the guiding principle. Thus the bleaker the facts you face, the tougher you seem to be.

Alan W. Watts

#12. The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events
that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies
and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends.

Alan Watts

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. Life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself. In this moment it is finished.

Alan W. Watts

#16. For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase - oddly enough - to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization.

Alan Watts

#17. it has been possible to make the insecurity of human life supportable by belief in unchanging things beyond the reach of calamity - in God, in man's immortal soul, and in the government of the universe by eternal laws of right. Today

Alan W. Watts

#18. 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

#19. The more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually killing what we love.

Alan Watts

#20. Just what should a young man or woman know to be 'in the know'? Is there, in other words, some inside information, some special taboo, some real lowdown on life and existence that most parents and teachers either don't know or won't tell?

Alan Watts

#21. 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 W. Watts

#22. 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 W. Watts

#23. When life is empty, with respect to the past, and aimless, with respect to the future, the vacuum is filled by the present - normally reduced to a hairline, a split second in which there is no time for anything to happen.

Alan W. Watts

#24. By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us.

Alan Watts

#25. The life of Zen begins, therefore, in a disillusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really exist the good without the bad, the gratification of a self which is no more than an idea, and the morrow which never comes.

Alan Watts

#26. Trying to pretend to oneself that a life of constant self frustration was in fact a great spiritual attainment.

Alan W. Watts

#27. Much of the secret of life consists in knowing how to laugh, and also how to breathe.

Alan W. Watts

#28. To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.

Alan Watts

#29. On the other hand, others felt that the world was a state of probation where material goods were to be used in a spirit of stewardship, as loans from the Almighty, and where the main work of life is loving devotion to God and to man.

Alan W. Watts

#30. No worthwhile life can be lived without risks, despite current American superstitions to the contrary ...

Alan Watts

#31. Man seems to be unable to live without myth, without the belief that the routine and drudgery, the pain and fear of this life have some meaning and goal in the future.

Alan W. Watts

#32. 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

#33. Life is a series of urgent choices demanding firm commitment to this or to that.

Alan W. Watts

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution , where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment ... only to vanish forever.

Alan Watts

#39. It is the seeker, who understands there is more than what meets the eye, who is not afraid and makes the choice to go into the unknown. The process of awaking has begun, the discovery is underway.

Alan Watts

#40. Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.

Alan W. Watts

#41. If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid.

Alan W. Watts

#42. But when you know for sure that your separate ego is a fiction, you actually feel yourself as the whole process and pattern of life. Experience and experiencer become one experiencing, known and knower one knowing.

Alan W. Watts

#43. Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith-in life, in other people, and in oneself-is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.

Alan Watts

#44. Is in vain that doctors prolong life if we spend the extra time being anxious to live still longer.

Alan W. Watts

#45. In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.

Alan W. Watts

#46. Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

Alan Watts

#47. In life as well as in art Zen never wastes energy in stopping to explain; it only indicates.

Alan Watts

#48. In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.

Alan Watts

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. To feel life is meaningless unless "I" can be permanent is like having desperately fallen in love with an inch.

Alan Watts

#52. 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

#53. Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal. For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it persists for ever.

Alan W. Watts

#54. The Shortness of Life: Seneca on Busyness and the Art of Living Wide Rather Than Living Long" "How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love" "9 Learnings from 9 Years of Brain Pickings" Anything about Alan Watts: "Alan Watts has changed my life. I've written about him quite a bit.

Timothy Ferriss

#55. To be alive spiritually man must have union with God and must be conscious of it. Apart from this union his religious life will be an empty drudgery, a mere imitation of true spirituality.

Alan Watts

#56. The destination of life is this eternal moment.

Alan Watts

#57. Part of man's frustration is that he has become accustomed to expect language and thought to offer explanations which they cannot give. To want life to be intelligible in this sense is to want it to be something other than life.

Alan W. Watts

#58. Nobody believes in God like an atheist: "There is no God, and I am His prophet.

Alan W. Watts

#59. We are not clear as to the role in life of these chemicals; nor are we clear as to the role of the physician. You know, of course, that in ancient times there was no clear distinction between priest and physician.

Alan Watts

#60. Different Chinese philosophers, writing probably in 5-4 centuries B.C., presented some major ideas and a way of life that are nowadays known under the name of Taoism, the way of correspondence between man and the tendency or the course of natural world.

Alan Watts

#61. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.

Alan W. Watts

#62. Life, like getting an erection, is a spontaneous process which collapses when one tries to force it to happen.

Alan W. Watts

#63. To define means to fix, and, when you get down to it, real life isn't fixed.

Alan W. Watts

#64. More and more we try to effect an adaptation to life by means of external gadgets, and attempt to solve our problems by conscious thinking rather than unconscious 'know-how'. This is much less to our advantage than we like to suppose.

Alan Watts

#65. The meaning of being alive is just being alive

Alan W. Watts

#66. Thus not to see the unity of self and other is the fear of life, and not to see the unity of being and nonbeing is the fear of death.

Alan W. Watts

#67. As long as you do not know how to die and come to life again, you are but a sorry traveler on this dark earth.

Alan W. Watts