Alan W. Watts Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

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

The source of all light is in the eye.

Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.

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

Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated

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

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

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.

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.

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

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

The menu is not the meal.

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.

People become concerned with being more humble than other people.

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.

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

Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.

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

I owe my solitude to other people.

One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.

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.

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.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.

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.

Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.

There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.

Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them.

I have always thought that all philosophical debates are ultimately between the partisans of structure and the partisans of "goo.

The brush must draw by itself. This cannot happen if one does not practice constantly. But neither can it happen if one makes an effort.

To practice with an end in view is to have one eye on the practice and the other on the end, which is lack of concentration, lack of sincerity.

It is both dangerous and absurd for our world to be a group of communions mutually excommunicate.

My conscious mind must have its roots and origins in the most unfathomable depths of being, yet it feels as if it lived all by itself in this tight little skull.

The realm of liberation is absolutely incommensurable with the relativities of higher and lower, better and worse, gain and loss, since these are all disadvantages of the ego.

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

We might 'conquer' nature if we could first, or at the same time, conquer our own nature, though we do not see that human nature and 'outside' nature are all of a piece.

W might 'conquer' nature if we could first, or at the same time, conquer our own nature, though we do not see that human nature and 'outside' nature are all of a piece.

And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light. I return in every baby born.

Discord on one level is harmony on another

Money alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy.

To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead.