Alan Wilson Watts

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

- Alan Wilson Watts

"The source of all light is in the eye."

- Alan Wilson Watts

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

- Alan Wilson Watts

"Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that 'I' and all other 'things' now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them - to know it now as surely as if you had just fallen off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Indeed you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it's no help to cling to the rocks falling with you. If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise; you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are."

- Alan Wilson Watts

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

- Alan Wilson Watts

"But the transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions. As Lao-tzu said, 'The scholar gains every day, but the Taoist loses every day.'"

- Alan Wilson Watts

"I owe my solitude to other people."

- Alan Wilson Watts

"Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to."

- Alan Wilson Watts

"Where there is to be creative action, it is quite beside the point to discuss what we should or should not do in order to be right or good. 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. Its interest is not in itself, but in the people and problems of which it is aware; these are 'itself.' It acts, not according to the rules, but according to the circumstances of the moment, and the 'well' it wishes to others is not security but liberty."

- Alan Wilson Watts

"When somebody plays music, you listen. You just follow those sounds, and eventually you understand the music. The point can't be explained in words because music is not words, but after listening for a while, you understand the point of it, and that point is the music itself. In exactly the same way, you can listen to all experiences."

- Alan Wilson 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 Wilson 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 Wilson 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 Wilson Watts

"To look at life without words is not to lose the ability to form words- to think, remember, and plan. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam. It is the same with thinking, which is really silent talking. It is not, by itself, open to the discovery of anything new, for its only novelties are simply arrangements of old words and ideas."

- Alan Wilson Watts

"There are, then, two ways of understanding an experience. The first is to compare it with the memories of other experiences, and so to name and define it. This is to interpret it in accordance with the dead and the past. The second is to be aware of it as it is, as when, in the intensity of joy, we forget past and future, let the present be all, and thus do not even stop to think, 'I am happy.'"

- Alan Wilson 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 Wilson 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 Wilson Watts

"The agnostic, the skeptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy; it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself. The intellectual who tries to escape from neurosis by escaping from the facts is merely acting on the principle that 'where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.'"

- Alan Wilson Watts

"The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it with the world as they think about it and talk about it and describe it. For on the one hand there is the real world and on the other there is a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds. These are very very useful symbols, all civilization depends on them, but like all good things they have their disadvantages, and the principle disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth."

- Alan Wilson Watts