Top Quotes by Alan Watts

About Alan Watts

Alan Watts, an intellectual maverick, mystical philosopher, and captivating speaker, left an indelible mark on the world of Eastern philosophy and Western thought. Born on January 6, 1915, in Chislehurst, England, Watts' profound understanding of both Eastern and Western traditions allowed him to forge a bridge between ancient wisdom and contemporary consciousness.

Beyond his role as a philosopher and scholar, Alan Watts was an ardent advocate for living in harmony with the rhythms of nature and embracing the inherent mystery of life. He encouraged individuals to go beyond the confines of rigid societal norms and conventional belief systems, urging them to embrace the spontaneity and unpredictability of existence. Watts' wisdom inspired a generation to question the pursuit of material wealth and to find meaning in the simple joys of being alive, reminding us that true fulfillment lies in the present moment and the exploration of our inner selves.

Watts' groundbreaking writings, including his influential book "The Wisdom of Insecurity," challenged the notion of seeking security in an ever-changing world. He encouraged readers to embrace uncertainty as a natural part of life, emphasizing the importance of living fully in the now rather than being bound by the regrets of the past or the anxieties of the future.

Alan Watts' enduring legacy is one of intellectual enlightenment and spiritual liberation. His words continue to echo across time, guiding us towards a deeper understanding of ourselves and the vast mysteries of existence. In a world yearning for meaning and purpose, Watts' teachings remain a beacon of wisdom, urging us to embark on an inward journey of self-discovery and to awaken to the profound beauty and interconnectedness of all life.

Alan Watts Quotes

“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

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

― Alan Watts

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

― Alan Watts

“By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us.”

― 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

“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”

― Alan Watts

“Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be.”

― 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

“No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.”

― 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

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

― Alan Watts

“The menu is not the meal.”

― Alan Watts

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”

― 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

“You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.”

― Alan Watts

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

― Alan Watts

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”

― 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

“We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.”

― Alan Watts

“People sometimes fail to live because they are always preparing to live.”

― Alan Watts

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

― Alan Watts

“I owe my solitude to other people.”

― Alan Watts

“But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.”

― Alan Watts

“How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.”

― Alan Watts

“Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy and you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, ‘My goodness, I’ve just discovered that I’m God,’ they’ll laugh and say, ‘Oh, congratulations, at last you found out.”

― Alan Watts

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

― 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

“Unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax.”

― 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. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.”

― Alan Watts

“The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.”

― Alan Watts

“Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.”

― 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. That's one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now.”

― Alan Watts

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

― Alan Watts

“Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.”

― Alan Watts

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

― Alan Watts

“So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.”

― Alan Watts

“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”

― Alan Watts

“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.”

― Alan Watts

“A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.”

― Alan Watts

“Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.”

― Alan Watts

“We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.”

― 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

“If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid.”

― 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

“Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”

― Alan Watts

“By going out of your mind, you come to your senses.”

― Alan Watts

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

― Alan Watts

“To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.”

― 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

“And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.”

― Alan Watts

“If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.”

― Alan Watts

“Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown.”

― Alan Watts

“To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.”

― Alan Watts

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

― Alan Watts

“What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.”

― Alan Watts

“Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social environment.”

― Alan Watts

“You're under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.”

― Alan Watts

“...[W]ords can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.”

― Alan Watts

“If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.”

― Alan Watts

“Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home.”

― Alan Watts

“Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.”

― Alan Watts

“If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed”

― Alan Watts

“When you are not getting in the way of yourself, you will begin to find out that all the great things you do are really happenings. All growth is something that happens. For growth to happen two things are important. You must have the technical ability to express what happens. And secondly, you must get out of your own way.”

― Alan Watts

“Nirvana is right where you are, provided that you don’t object to it.”

― Alan Watts

“What happens if you know that there is nothing you can do to be better? It’s kind of a relief isn’t it? You say ‘Well, now what do I do?’ When you are freed from being out to improve yourself, your own nature will begin to take over.”

― Alan Watts

“If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives we may forget altogether to live them.”

― Alan Watts

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

― Alan Watts

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

― Alan Watts

“Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.”

― Alan Watts

“A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with Reality, and lives in a world of illusion.”

― Alan Watts

“And if you stay in your mind all the time, you are over rational. In other words, you’re like a very rigid bridge which because it has got no give, no craziness in it, is going to be blown down in the first hurricane.”

― Alan Watts

“Light is a relationship between electrical energy and eyeballs. It is you, in other words, who evoke the world and you evoke the world in accordance with what kind of a ‘you’ you are.”

― Alan Watts

“People who exude love are apt to give things away. They are in every way like rivers; they stream. And so when they collect possessions, and things they like, they are apt to give them to other people. Because, have you ever noticed that when you start giving things away, you keep getting more?”

― Alan Watts

“Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure.”

― Alan Watts

“There’s no need to possess [the Tao]. You are it, and by trying to possess it you imply that you’re not. So, by trying to catch hold of it, you as it were, push it away… Although you can’t really push it away because the very pushing is all it. You see?”

― 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

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

― Alan Watts

“Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment.”

― Alan Watts

“When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.”

― Alan Watts

“Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith in life, in other people, and in oneself, is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.”

― Alan Watts