Alan W. Watts quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Alan W. Watts

Alan W. Watts Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Alan W. Watts on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

If we are to have intense pleasures, we must also be liable to intense pains.

Aesthetics is really a much better approach to ethics than theology is.

One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.

I am basically an eternal existence
momentarily and perhaps needlessly
terrified by one half of itself..

[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.

The ego-self constantly pushes reality away. It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories.

If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.

Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.

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.

Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree.

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

What is real, if you have decided to live in the dimension of space and time, is muscle and nerve.

All belief is fervent hope, and thus a cover-up for doubt and uncertainty - religions

Every one of us is an aperture through which the whole cosmos looks out.

You didn't come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.

Read Theodore Schwenk's marvelous book Sensitive Chaos (London, Rudolph Steiner Press, 1965),

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of ... Nothing is left but to love.

But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

Because the world is not going anywhere there is no hurry.

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.

If we are open only to discoveries which will accord with what we know already, we may as well stay shut.

Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once.

Like a mighty army moves the Church of God. But this is no way for a gentle-man.

The frightened mind that runs away from everyday terrors meets the seeking mind that wants a better world.

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.

It just happens, and all happenings are mutually interdependent in a way that seems unbelievably harmonious.

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.

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

I have always thought that all philosophical debates are ultimately between the partisans of structure and the partisans of goo.

For the trouble with our rich and powerful people is not so much that they are wicked, but that they do not enjoy themselves.

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.

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair.

I obtained not the least thing from unexcelled, complete awakening, and for this very reason it is called unexcelled, complete awakening.

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.

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.

Evil" read backwards is "live." Demon est deus inversus.

You don't understand the basic assumptions of your own culture if your own culture is the only culture you know.

Belief clings, but faith lets go.

human beings are overshadowed by anxiety because of our divided selves. I

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

Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.

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.

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

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.

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

Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.

You're under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

We are convinced that sleep is a waste of valuable time and continue to chase these fantasies far into the night.

Backwards law. When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float.

Almost all civilized peoples have been brought up to think of themselves as ghosts in machines,

Like words, memories never really succeed in "catching" reality.

Logic, intelligence, and reason are satisfied, but the heart goes hungry.

[A] certain amount of "sitting just to sit" might well be the best thing in the world for the jittery minds and agitated bodies [...].

I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.

Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.

A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.

For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.

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

If a man seeks the Buddha, that man loses the Buddha.

My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern in the water.

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

Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.

I owe my solitude to other people.

For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.

The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from the giant pine, which lives for a thousand years.

You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.

What will happen to me when I die is, after all, like asking what happens to my fist when I open my hand

Actually, the world is not complex. It is the task of trying to figure it out with words or numbers that is complex.

Salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves. This

Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge
of oneself.

What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like?

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

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

Us. The good of contemplation is contemplation - not some result that it may bring.

The menu is not the meal.

The most real state, is the state of nothing.

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.

People become concerned with being more humble than other people.

Human desire tends to be insatiable.

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.

The possession of a strong will and a clever head makes some things very difficult to see

The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.

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

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.

It is really impossible to appreciate what is meant by the Tao without becoming, in a rather special sense, stupid.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

[W]ords can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.

only doubtful truths need defense.

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.

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.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

The source of all light is in the eye.

fear is born of duality -