Top 100 Quotes About Alan Watts
#1. [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
#2. It wasn't until after I'd been around Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts, that I started to reflect about issues like the evolution of consciousness.
Ram Dass
#3. 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
#4. Alan Watts, the Buddhist scholar, proposed the existence of a mental faculty he called forgettory, which is the flip side of memory. There are times, Watts maintained, when we need to forget things, to let them slip away into the unremembered past.
Larry Dossey
#5. 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
#6. Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
Alan W. Watts
#7. I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.
Alan W. Watts
#8. For a decision-the freest of my actions just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.
Alan Watts
#9. 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
#10. How did you know you're alive, unless you'd once been dead?
Alan Watts
#11. To feel life is meaningless unless "I" can be permanent is like having desperately fallen in love with an inch.
Alan Watts
#12. 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
#13. What keeps us from happiness is our inability to fully inhabit the present
Alan Watts
#14. The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
Alan W. Watts
#15. 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
#16. The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.
Alan Watts
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be
Alan Watts
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.
Alan W. Watts
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head.
Alan Watts
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
Alan Watts
#32. Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
Alan W. Watts
#33. 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
#34. Almost all civilized peoples have been brought up to think of themselves as ghosts in machines,
Alan W. Watts
#35. 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
#36. Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery.
Alan Watts
#37. It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.
Alan W. Watts
#38. For if we do not know even how we manage to be conscious and intelligent, it is most rash to assume that we know what the role of conscious intelligence will be, and still more that it is competent to order the world.
Alan W. Watts
#39. [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
#41. [H]uman experience is determined as much by the nature of the mind and the structure of its senses as by the external objects whose presence the mind reveals.
Alan W. Watts
#42. Self-consciousness is a stoppage because it is like interrupting a song after every note so as to listen to the echo, and then feeling irritated because of the loss of rhythm.
Alan W. Watts
#43. In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.
Alan Watts
#44. Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
Alan W. Watts
#45. However much I may be impressed by the difference between a star and the dark space around it, I must not forget that I can see the two only in relation to each other, and that this relation is inseparable.
Alan Watts
#46. For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.
Alan W. Watts
#47. And the more you become aware of the unknown self - if you become aware of it - the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is.
Alan Watts
#48. If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.
Alan W. Watts
#49. In life as well as in art Zen never wastes energy in stopping to explain; it only indicates.
Alan Watts
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point.
Alan Watts
#53. Billions of years ago you were a big bang. But now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off. And don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are.
Alan Watts
#54. 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
#55. I was talking to a Zen master the other day and he said, "You shall be my disciple."I looked at him and said, "Who was Buddha's teacher?" He looked at me in a very odd way for a moment and then he burst into laughter and handed me a piece of clover.
Alan Watts
#56. Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.
Alan Watts
#57. 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
#58. There is an ineffable mystery that underlies ourselves and the world. It is the darkness from which the light shines. When you recognize the integrity of the universe and that death is as certain as birth, then you can relax and accept that this is the way it is. There is nothing else to do.
Alan Watts
#59. It's time to question a job or career move when it seems like most energy is devoted to making things appear other than what they really are.
Alan Watts
#60. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.
Alan W. Watts
#61. We are convinced that sleep is a waste of valuable time and continue to chase these fantasies far into the night.
Alan W. Watts
#62. Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.
Alan Watts
#63. All too easily, we confuse the world as we symbolize it with the world as it is. As semanticist Alfred Korzybski used to say, it is an urgent necessity to distinguish between the map and the territory and, he might have added, between the flag and the country.
Alan W. Watts
#64. Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person.
Alan Watts
#65. The world is a marvelous system of wiggles.
Alan Watts
#66. I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek.
Alan Watts
#67. We learn nothing of very much importance when it can be explained entirely in terms of past experience. If it were possible to understand all things in terms of what we know already, we could convey the sense of color to a blind man with nothing but sound, taste, touch, and smell.
Alan W. Watts
#68. You're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe.
Alan Watts
#69. They are enlightened who join in this play knowing it as play, for people suffer only because they take as serious what the gods made for fun.
Alan Watts
#70. When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there ... You're looking at you..
Alan Watts
#71. I knew of a physicist at the University of Chicago who was rather crazy like some scientists, and the idea of the insolidity, the instability of the physical world impressed him so much that he used to go around in enormous padded slippers for fear he should fall through the floor.
Alan Watts
#72. Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time as much as patterns in space.
Alan Watts
#73. Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.
Alan W. Watts
#74. How can a republic be the best form of government if the universe, heaven and hell are all a monarchy?
Alan W. Watts
#75. To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.
Alan Watts
#76. There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again.
Alan Watts
#77. You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.
Alan Watts
#78. If you can't meditate in a boiler room, you can't meditate.
Alan Watts
#79. 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
#80. Although profoundly "inconsequential," the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied it lends an unmistakable quality to the work.
Alan Watts
#81. We all need to go out of our minds at least once a day.
When we go out of our minds we quickly come to our senses.
Alan Watts
#82. 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 W. Watts
#83. My conscious mind must have its roots and origins in the most unfathomable depths of being, yet it feels as if it lived all by itself in this tight little skull.
Alan W. Watts
#84. The realm of liberation is absolutely incommensurable with the relativities of higher and lower, better and worse, gain and loss, since these are all disadvantages of the ego.
Alan W. Watts
#85. To remain caught up in ideas and words about Zen is, as the old masters say, to stink of Zen.
Alan Watts
#86. The common error of ordinary religious practice is to mistake the symbol for the reality, to look at the finger pointing the way and then to suck it for comfort rather than follow it.
Alan W. Watts
#87. 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
#88. What are we saying when we say now, something is holy? That means you should take a different attitude to what you are doing than if you were, for example, doing it for kicks.
Alan Watts
#89. Do you define yourself as a victim of the world? Or, as the world?
Alan Watts
#90. Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up.
Alan Watts
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. Every in group distinguishes itself from the outgroup by some process of "going through the mill" or enduring sufferings which are subsequently worn as the proud badge of graduation
Alan W. Watts
#95. We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible.
Alan Watts
#96. 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
#97. There is no coming toward it or going away from it; it is, and you are it.
Alan Watts
#98. 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
#99. The person who is constantly anxious is the person who is resisting the flip-flopability of things.
Alan W. Watts
#100. 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
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