Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Alan W. Watts, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Alan W. Watts quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 255 Alan W. Watts quotes for you to read and share.
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
I have always thought that all philosophical debates are ultimately between the partisans of structure and the partisans of goo. -- Alan W. Watts
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
Nobody believes in God like an atheist: "There is no God, and I am His prophet. -- Alan W. Watts
The future is unknown. Prophecy contaminates it with the past, which is why liberated people do not bother with fortunetelling or astrology, and why the happy traveler wanders and does not let himself be the slave of maps, guidebooks, and schedules, using them but not being used by them. -- Alan W. Watts
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
I am basically an eternal existence
momentarily and perhaps needlessly
terrified by one half of itself.. -- Alan W. Watts
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
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
Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior. -- Alan W. Watts
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
Belief clings, but faith lets go. -- Alan W. Watts
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
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
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
The source of all light is in the eye. -- Alan W. Watts
[W]ords can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences. -- Alan W. Watts
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
W might 'conquer' nature if we could first, or at the same time, conquer our own nature, though we do not see that human nature and 'outside' nature are all of a piece. -- Alan W. Watts
only doubtful truths need defense. -- Alan W. Watts
I assume that maybe you are not serious, but sincere. -- Alan W. Watts
Wonder is not a disease. 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. Is -- Alan W. Watts
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
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
But as I revisit the arguments offered so boldly in The Wisdom of Insecurity, I can feel the shock of truth that it produced in me. His -- Alan W. Watts
I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination. -- Alan W. 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 W. Watts
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
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
When you no longer make the distinction between the universe and how you are acting upon it, you are really on your own and so acquire a sense of responsibility. -- Alan W. Watts
Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body, he 'has' a body. Instead of living and loving he 'has' instincts for survival and copulation. -- Alan W. Watts
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
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
Eskimos have five words for different kinds of snow, because they live with it and it is important to them. But the Aztec language has but one word for snow, rain, and hail. -- Alan W. Watts
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
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
The mark of an intelligent and educated man is one who does not really accept the idea of "work". That is to say; he does not accept the process of doing chores every day, that aren't in the least bit interesting to him, just in order to go on living. -- Alan W. Watts
It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description. -- Alan W. Watts
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
fear is born of duality - -- Alan W. Watts
We are convinced that sleep is a waste of valuable time and continue to chase these fantasies far into the night. -- Alan W. Watts
Life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself. In this moment it is finished. -- Alan W. Watts
The ego-self constantly pushes reality away. It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories. -- Alan W. Watts
Millennia ago, some genius discovered that such wiggles as fish and
rabbits could be caught in nets. Much later, some other genius thought
of catching the world in a net. -- Alan W. Watts
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
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
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way. -- Alan W. 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 W. 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 W. Watts
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
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
Life seems to be a system that eats itself to death, and in which victory equals defeat. -- Alan W. Watts
Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering. -- Alan W. Watts
Backwards law. When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float. -- Alan W. Watts
In a civilization devoted to the strictly abstract and mathematical ideal of making the most money in the least time, the only sure method of success is to cheat the customer, to sell various kinds of nothingness in pretentious packages. -- Alan W. Watts
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
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
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
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
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
If living is to end in pain, incompleteness, and nothingness, it seems a cruel and futile experience for beings who are born to reason, hope, create, and love. -- Alan W. Watts
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself. -- Alan W. Watts
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
The death of the individual is not disconnection but simply withdrawal. The corpse is like a footprint or an echo - the dissolving trace of something which the Self has ceased to do. -- Alan W. Watts
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
What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like? -- Alan W. Watts
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
Accustomed, as it is, to think of man as a dualism of mind and body, and to regard the former as "sensible" and the latter as a "dumb" animal, our cultture is an affront to the wisdom of nature and a ruinous exploitation of the human organism as a whole. -- Alan W. Watts
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. -- Alan W. Watts
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
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 W. Watts
Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality. -- Alan W. 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 W. Watts
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
Today we hear a lot of songs about love, and the mention of the big love thing on the way. You know what I would do? I would buy a gun and bar my door because I would know there is a storm of hypocrisy brewing. -- Alan W. Watts
Like a mighty army moves the Church of God. But this is no way for a gentle-man. -- Alan W. Watts
Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present. -- Alan W. Watts
How can a republic be the best form of government if the universe, heaven and hell are all a monarchy? -- Alan W. Watts
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
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
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
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
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
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
The person who is constantly anxious is the person who is resisting the flip-flopability of things. -- Alan W. Watts
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun. -- Alan W. Watts
[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
For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere. -- Alan W. Watts
Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone. -- Alan W. Watts
Essays in Zen Buddhism -- Alan W. Watts
[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
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
Almost all civilized peoples have been brought up to think of themselves as ghosts in machines, -- Alan W. Watts
We can't reimpose old myths on ourselves or believe in new ones made up out of a desire for comfort; therefore, the path of self-examination is the only one a person of conscience can reasonably follow. -- Alan W. 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 W. Watts
In the Garden of Eden Adam saw the animals before he named them: in the traditional system, children named the animals before they saw them.1 -- Alan W. 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 W. Watts
The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion. -- Alan W. Watts
Man aspires to govern nature, but the more one studies ecology, the
more absurd it seems to speak of any one feature of an organism, or of
an organism/environment field, as governing or ruling others. -- Alan W. Watts
To define means to fix, and, when you get down to it, real life isn't fixed. -- Alan W. Watts
[F]ast intercommunication between points is making all points the same point. -- Alan W. Watts
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
Is in vain that doctors prolong life if we spend the extra time being anxious to live still longer. -- Alan W. 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 W. Watts
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
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
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
The menu is not the meal. -- Alan W. Watts
He who thinks that God is not comprehended, by him God is comprehended; but he who thinks that God is comprehended knows him not. God is unknown to those who know him, and is known to those who do not know him at all. -- Alan W. Watts
If we are open only to discoveries which will accord with what we know already, we may as well stay shut. -- Alan W. Watts
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
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 W. Watts
Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency. -- Alan W. Watts
Salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves. This -- Alan W. Watts
I am what happens between the maternity ward and the Crematorium -- Alan W. Watts
The frightened mind that runs away from everyday terrors meets the seeking mind that wants a better world. -- Alan W. Watts
If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black. -- Alan W. Watts
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
Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them. -- Alan W. Watts
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
Discord on one level is harmony on another -- Alan W. Watts
Herein lies the crux of the matter. To stand face to face with insecurity is still not to understand it. To understand it, you must not face it but be it. -- Alan W. Watts
(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
In the Gestalt theory of perception this is known as the figure/ground
relationship. This theory asserts, in brief, that no figure is ever perceived
except in relation to a background. -- Alan W. Watts
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
If a man seeks the Buddha, that man loses the Buddha. -- Alan W. Watts
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. -- Alan W. Watts
Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree. -- Alan W. Watts
Because all is lost, there is nothing to lose -- Alan W. Watts
It just happens, and all happenings are mutually interdependent in a way that seems unbelievably harmonious. -- Alan W. Watts
Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge
of oneself. -- Alan W. Watts
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
We have untold stacks of recorded music from every age and culture, and the most superb means of playing it. But who actually listens? Maybe a few pot-smokers. -- Alan W. Watts
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
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
human beings are overshadowed by anxiety because of our divided selves. I -- Alan W. Watts
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
For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end. -- Alan W. Watts
A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily. -- Alan W. 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 W. Watts
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
You're under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago. -- Alan W. Watts
If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go. -- Alan W. Watts
[T]he joy of travel is not nearly so much in getting where one wants to go as in the unsought surprises which occur on the journey. -- Alan W. Watts
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
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
The possession of a strong will and a clever head makes some things very difficult to see -- Alan W. Watts
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
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
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
But dispelling this dread isn't a matter of trying to forget about washing dishes, it is realizing that in actual fact you only have one dish to wash, ever: this one; only one step to take, ever: this one. And that is Zen. -- Alan W. Watts
In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself. -- Alan W. Watts
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
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
It is really impossible to appreciate what is meant by the Tao without becoming, in a rather special sense, stupid. -- Alan W. 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 W. Watts
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
The next aspect of the mystical feeling is even more difficult to assimilate into our ordinary practical intelligence. It is the overwhelming sense that everything that happens - everything that I or anybody else has ever done - is part of a harmonious design and that there is no error at all. -- Alan W. Watts
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 W. Watts
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
I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware. -- Alan W. Watts
I owe my solitude to other people. -- Alan W. Watts
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
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
The more a person knows of himself, the more he will hesitate to define his nature and to assert what he must necessarily feel, and the more he will be astounded at his capacity to feel in unsuspected and unpredictable ways. -- Alan W. Watts
There are various levels above and below the human through which the individual soul may pass in the course of its reincarnations - the angelic, the titanic, the animal, the purgatories, and the realm of the frustrated ghosts. -- Alan W. Watts
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
Read Theodore Schwenk's marvelous book Sensitive Chaos (London, Rudolph Steiner Press, 1965), -- Alan W. Watts
And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words ... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning. -- Alan W. Watts
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
Because even then I was ill at ease with the commitment to spiritual imperialism which most Christians feel to be the sine qua non of being Christian, as if one could not be a true Christian without being a militant missionary. -- Alan W. Watts
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
[T]he anxiety-laden problem of what will happen to me when I die is, after all, like asking what happens to my fist when I open my hand, or where my lap goes when I stand up. -- Alan W. Watts
This is not a philosophy of not looking where one is going; it is a philosophy of not making where one is going so much more important than where one is that there will be no point in going. -- Alan W. Watts
Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair. -- Alan W. Watts
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
Much of the secret of life consists in knowing how to laugh, and also how to breathe. -- Alan W. Watts
Every one of us is an aperture through which the whole cosmos looks out. -- Alan W. Watts
Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction. -- Alan W. Watts
To "know" reality you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, and feel it. -- Alan W. Watts
My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern in the water. -- Alan W. Watts
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
Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know. -- Alan W. Watts
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
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
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
If we are to have intense pleasures, we must also be liable to intense pains. -- Alan W. Watts
All belief is fervent hope, and thus a cover-up for doubt and uncertainty - religions -- Alan W. Watts
A mind that is single and sincere is not interested in being good, in conducting relations with other people so as to live up to a rule. Nor, on the other hand, is it interested in being free, in acting perversely just to prove its independence. -- Alan W. Watts
as masters of technical weapons we are fighting the environment as if we still believed ourselves to be strangers on the earth, sent down into this world from a purely abstract, ideational, and spiritual heaven. -- Alan W. Watts
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
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
The brain can only assume its proper behavior when consciousness is doing what it is designed for: not writhing and whirling to get out of present experience, but being effortlessly aware of it. -- Alan W. Watts
If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are "crying for the moon." We have no such assurance. The best predictions are still matters of probability rather than certainty, and to the best of our knowledge every one of us is going to suffer and die. -- Alan W. Watts
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
The greatest illusion of the abstract ego is that it can do anything to bring about radical improvement either in itself or in the world. -- Alan W. Watts
Life is a series of urgent choices demanding firm commitment to this or to that. -- Alan W. Watts
A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter. -- Alan W. Watts
Once the mind has seen through all fear and all hope, it finds peace within itself, in a state of awareness beyond thought. -- Alan W. Watts
I obtained not the least thing from unexcelled, complete awakening, and for this very reason it is called unexcelled, complete awakening. -- Alan W. Watts
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
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command. -- Alan W. Watts
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
But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know. -- Alan W. Watts
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
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
The most real state, is the state of nothing. -- Alan W. Watts
What is real, if you have decided to live in the dimension of space and time, is muscle and nerve. -- Alan W. Watts
People become concerned with being more humble than other people. -- Alan W. Watts
You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing. -- Alan W. Watts
Out of Mind spring in-numerable things, conditioned by discrimination (i.e., classification) and habit-energy; these things people accept as an external world. ... -- Alan W. Watts
Society is our extended mind and body. -- Alan W. Watts
The intelligence being unconscious of positive and negative implies that the heart (hsin) is at ease. -- Alan W. Watts
The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless. -- Alan W. Watts
Evil" read backwards is "live." Demon est deus inversus. -- Alan W. Watts
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
The meaning of being alive is just being alive -- Alan W. Watts
My problem as a writer, using words, is to dispel the illusions of language while employing one of the languages that generates them. I can succeed only on the principle of a hair of the dog that bit you. -- Alan W. Watts
Life, like getting an erection, is a spontaneous process which collapses when one tries to force it to happen. -- Alan W. Watts
Because the world is not going anywhere there is no hurry. -- Alan W. Watts
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
We are creatures rearranged, for biological existence continues only through the mutual slaughter and ingestion of its various species. I exist solely through membership in this perfectly weird arrangement of beings that flourish by chewing each other up. Obviously, -- Alan W. Watts
It is both dangerous and absurd for our world to be a group of communions mutually excommunicate. -- Alan W. 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 W. Watts
The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually "grasp" reality. -- Alan W. Watts
You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meanings of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales. -- Alan W. Watts
Trying to pretend to oneself that a life of constant self frustration was in fact a great spiritual attainment. -- Alan W. Watts
Lao-tzu, that master of the law of reversed effort, who declared that those who justify themselves do not convince, that to know truth one must get rid of knowledge, and that nothing is more powerful and creative than emptiness - from which men shrink. -- Alan W. Watts
The centipede was happy, quite, Until a toad in fun Said, "Pray, which leg goes after which?" This worked his mind to such a pitch, He lay distracted in a ditch, Considering how to run. -- Alan W. Watts
Logic, intelligence, and reason are satisfied, but the heart goes hungry. -- Alan W. Watts
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
Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once. -- Alan W. Watts
Human desire tends to be insatiable. -- Alan W. Watts
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
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
You didn't come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here. -- Alan W. 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 W. Watts
Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything. -- Alan W. Watts
You don't understand the basic assumptions of your own culture if your own culture is the only culture you know. -- Alan W. Watts
The most basic Buddhist stance: sober examination of what lies before you, leaving aside all assumptions. -- Alan W. Watts
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
Aesthetics is really a much better approach to ethics than theology is. -- Alan W. Watts
We can only believe in what we have already known, preconceived, and imagined. But this is beyond any imagination. -- Alan W. Watts
Like words, memories never really succeed in "catching" reality. -- Alan W. Watts
Us. The good of contemplation is contemplation - not some result that it may bring. -- Alan W. Watts
