30 Inspirational Alan Watts Quotes to Ignite Your Spirit

"If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself – not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke - but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental."

- Alan W. 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

"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

"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

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

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan W. Watts

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

- 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

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

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

- Alan Watts

"A man does not really begin to be alive until he has lost himself, until he has released the anxious grasp which he normally holds upon his life, his property, his reputation and position."

- Alan W. 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

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

- Alan Watts

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

- 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

"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

"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

"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

"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

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

- Alan Wilson 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

"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

"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

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

- 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

"I have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort. Sometimes I call it the 'backwards law.' When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float. When you hold your breath, you lose it—which immediately calls to mind an ancient and much neglected saying, 'Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it.'"

- Alan W. 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

"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

"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

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

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan Watts

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

- 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

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

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan 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

"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

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

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan Watts

"Faith is a state of openness or trust."

- 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

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

- 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

"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

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

- Alan Watts

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

- 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

"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 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

"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

"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

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

- Alan Watts

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

- 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

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

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan Watts

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

- Alan Watts

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

- 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

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

- Alan Watts

"Saints need sinners."

- Alan Watts

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

- 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

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

- 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

"I owe my solitude to other people."

- 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

"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

"The future is a concept—it doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be because time is always now."