Alan Watts

Find the best quotes, maxims and aphorisms of Alan Watts

Biography : British philosopher, writer and speaker.
Born: 1915 - Died: 1973
Period:
20th century
Place of birth: United Kingdom

United Kingdom

Alan Watts - Quotes

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
Alan Watts - The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety /

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 /

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.

You can't live at all, unless you can live fully now.
Alan Watts /

You can't live at all, unless you can live fully now.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
Alan Watts /

water

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

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

Our deeds, our feelings, our thoughts, and our sensations just happen of themselves, as the rain falls and the water flows along the valley.
Alan Watts - In My Own Way /

You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.
Alan Watts /

You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.

Background photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
Alan Watts /

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

Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.
Alan Watts /

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
Alan Watts /

oneself

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.
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 are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.
Alan Watts /

universe

Death is the unknown in which all of us lived before birth.
Alan Watts /

death

Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.
Alan Watts

Duality is always secretly unity.
Alan Watts

By trying to understand everything in terms of memory, the past, and words, we have, as it were, had our noses in the guidebook for most of our lives, and have never looked at the view.
Alan Watts /

For the use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life.
Alan Watts - The Book – On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are /

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 /

I want to make one thing absolutely clear. I am not a Zen Buddhist, I am not advocating Zen Buddhism, I am not trying to convert anyone to it. I have nothing to sell. I'm an entertainer. That is to say, in the same sense, that when you go to a concert and you listen to someone play Mozart, he has nothing to sell except the sound of the music. He doesn’t want to convert you to anything. He doesn’t want you to join an organization in favor of Mozart's music as opposed to, say, Beethoven's. And I approach you in the same spirit as a musician with his piano or a violinist with his violin. I just want you to enjoy a point of view that I enjoy.
Alan Watts

music

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.
Alan Watts /

When we make music we don't do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point.
Alan Watts /

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself.
Alan Watts /

universe

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

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 that this is play.
Alan Watts /

You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that the wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.
Alan Watts

universe

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 /

Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word 'water' is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.
Alan Watts /