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

Alan Watts Famous Quotes & Sayings

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

Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure.

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

To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.

For a decision-the freest of my actions just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.

The trouble with many religions, accused of wishful thinking, is that they are not wishful enough. They show a deplorable lack of imagination.

But we must not suffer over the suffering.

A holy person is someone who is whole; who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites.

When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point.

It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.

We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.

Everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality ...

Religion is always falling apart.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

What would you do if money was no object?

There is a peculiar contradiction in trying to be a member of a republic while believing that the universe is a monarchy.

To go out of your mind at least once a day is tremendously important. By going out of your mind, you come to your senses.

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

For since there is no real 'way' to sartori, the way you are following makes very little difference.

If we are not totally blind, what we are seeking is already here. This is it.

This-the immediate, everyday, and present experience-is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

You can't get wet from the word 'water.'

If we live, we live; if we die, we die; if we suffer, we suffer; if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it.

The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.

Your soul isn't in your body; your body is in your soul!

And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.

Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time as much as patterns in space.

Every explicit duality is an implicit unity.

Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.

The best way to convince someone is by making him realize that what you speak came from his own mind.

Everything is perpetually becoming new.

We have a strange anxiety in us; that if we don't interfere then it won't happen. Now that's the root of an enormous amount of trouble.

Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.

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

Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.

What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born.

Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it.

What keeps us from happiness is our inability to fully inhabit the present

Duality is always secretly unity.

Just as the ocean is waving so each one of us is a waving of the whole cosmos, the entire works, all there is.

You don't need to try to be God, you are! But if you try to be God it means you don't know you are.

You can't have something without nothing.

The only serious side-effect of # marijuana is that you might get arrested.

Faith is a state of openness or trust.

How did you know you're alive, unless you'd once been dead?

In Zen, poverty is voluntary, and considered not really as poverty so much as simplicity, freedom, unclutteredness.

You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it.

We see what we believe rather than what we see.

It's so important to consider this question: What do I desire?

You, yourself, are the eternal energy which appears as this Universe. You didn't come into this world; you came out of it. Like a wave from the ocean.

Philosophy is man's expression of curiosity about everything and his attempt to make sense of the world primarily through his intellect.

I want ... to consort with people whose emotions are not ... cold and standoffish.

The destination of life is this eternal moment.

Many people think that the Bible is the authentic word of God and they worship the Bible, making it an idol ...

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.

That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality.

Our view of reality is like a chart of the sea - the truer it is, the less likely we will become lost.

Running away from fear is fear; fighting pain is pain; trying to be brave is being scared

For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method.

Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.

How could you say the best form of government is a republic if you think the universe is a monarchy?

Nets, grids, and other types of calculus.

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.

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.

To remain caught up in ideas and words about Zen is, as the old masters say, to stink of Zen.

I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek.

The Universe is the game of the self, which plays hide and seek forever and ever.

Sex is no longer a serious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more about it than adults.

The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.

All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head.

You can't figure out the Universe, especially if you're using figures to figure it.

If you can't meditate in a boiler room, you can't meditate.

Do you have any control over being conscious? Do you know how you will?

Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart.

We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

The mind's the standard of the man.

The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.

Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.

Change is an illusion because we're always at the place where any future can take us.

There is a deep, peaceful calm in the dawning of a new day.

We tend to regard ourselves as puppets of the Past, driven along by something that is always behind us.

You find out that the universe is a system that creeps up on itself and says 'Boo' and then laughs at itself for jumping.

You will begin to realize that if you contemplate long enough on the leaf of the flower, that it involves the whole universe.

And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plowshares into swords

You must not be afraid of playing wrong notes. Just forget it, play it wrong! But play!

Lack of love for the vegetative, subtle, cthonic, pagan, and sexy aspect of the world means death.

The real Zen of the old Chinese masters was wu-shih, or "no fuss."

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

Chaos is always losing, but never defeated

Basically, there is simply nothing to worry about, because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe.

We usually don't look. We overlook.

The habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism: to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns.

A paradox is only a truth standing on its head to attract attention.

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.

You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.

There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it.

Faith ... is letting go and trusting oneself to the unknown.

But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.