Alan W. Watts Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Alan W. Watts
Alan W. Watts Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Alan W. Watts on Wise Famous Quotes.
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..
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.
You didn't come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.
When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of ... Nothing is left but to love.
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
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.
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.
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.
You don't understand the basic assumptions of your own culture if your own culture is the only culture you know.
Life, like getting an erection, is a spontaneous process which collapses when one tries to force it to happen.
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.
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.
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.
[A] certain amount of "sitting just to sit" might well be the best thing in the world for the jittery minds and agitated bodies [...].
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.
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.
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
Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
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.
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.
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.
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.