Alan Watts

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

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan Watts

"But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us."

- Alan Watts

"Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them."

- Alan Watts

"What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously."

- Alan Watts

"We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future."

- Alan Watts

"No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen."

- Alan Watts

"We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain."

- Alan Watts

"Saints need sinners."

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan Watts

"Why don’t you really know what you want? Two reasons: 1. You have it. 2. You don’t know yourself, because you never can... Just as a knife doesn’t cut itself, fire doesn’t burn itself, light doesn’t illumine itself. You're always an endless mystery to yourself."

- Alan Watts

"The key to a healthier life is understanding yourself."

- Alan Watts

"What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do."

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan Watts

"No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them."

- Alan Watts

"BETTER TO HAVE A SHORT LIFE THAT IS FULL OF WHAT YOU LIKE DOING, THAN A LONG LIFE SPENT IN A MISERABLE WAY."

- Alan Watts

"We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain"

- Alan Watts

"Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after."

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan Watts

"In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all."

- Alan Watts

"Faith is a state of openness or trust."

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan 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 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 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 Watts

"You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean."

- Alan 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 Watts

"The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, cut off from the richness of life."

- Alan Watts

"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

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

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan Watts

"You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago."

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan Watts

"The only thing that really belongs to us is time; even he who has nothing else has that."

- Alan Watts

"Although the rhythm of the waves beats a kind of time, it is not clock or calendar time. It has no urgency. It happens to be timeless time."

- Alan 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 Watts

"The only way to live is to accept each moment as an unrepeatable miracle, which is exactly what it is: a miracle and unrepeatable."

- Alan 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 Watts

"The only thing that ultimately matters is to eat an ice cream cone, play a slide trombone, plant a small tree, good God, now you’re free."

- Alan Watts

"The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step that you are taking at this moment. That’s all there ever is."

- Alan Watts

"No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now."

- Alan 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 Watts

"We find there is only present, only an eternal now."

- Alan Watts

"Most of us assume as a matter of common sense that space is nothing, that it's not important and has no energy. But as a matter of fact, space is the basis of existence. How could you have stars without space? Stars shine out of space and something comes out of nothing just in the same way as when you listen, in an unprejudiced way, you hear all sounds coming out of silence. It is amazing. Silence is the origin of sound just as space is the origin of stars, and woman is the origin of man. If you listen and pay close attention to what is, you will discover that there is no past, no future, and no one listening. You cannot hear yourself listening. You live in the eternal now and you are that. It is really extremely simple, and that is the way it is."

- Alan Watts

"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 Watts

"Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone."

- Alan Watts

"Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment."

- Alan 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 Watts

"Don’t hurry anything. Don’t worry about the future. Don’t worry about what progress you’re making. Just be entirely content to be aware of what is."

- Alan Watts

"The more a thing is forced to be something, the more it is unable to be anything else."

- Alan Watts

"The only way to make sense of change is to plunge into it flow with it . . . and join the dance."

- Alan Watts

"The only way to learn is to live."

- Alan Watts

"Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know."

- Alan Watts

"But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful."

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan Watts

"A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world."

- Alan Watts

"If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly."

- Alan Watts

"The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens."

- Alan Watts

"Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it's just doing it."

- Alan Watts

"Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations."

- Alan Watts

"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

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

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan Watts

"The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there."

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan Watts

"We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree."

- Alan Watts

"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

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

- Alan Watts

"Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe."

- Alan Watts

"Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—to the 'conquest' of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature."

- Alan Watts

"The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile."

- Alan Watts

"When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment."

- Alan Watts