Alan Watts Quotes

The soul is something which contains the body. The body doesn't contain the soul. The soul, if we put it into modern language, is the entire complex of relationships in whose context this organism exists. ~ Alan Watts

The habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism: to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns. ~ Alan Watts

Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up. ~ Alan Watts

You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it. ~ 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

To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely with this universe. You feel profoundly rooted in it and connected with it. You feel, in other words, that the whole energy, which expresses itself in the galaxies, is intimate. It is not something to which you are a stranger, but it is that with which you, whatever it is, are intimately bound up. That in your seeing, your hearing, your talking, your thinking, your moving, you express that which it is that moves the sun and other stars. ~ Alan Watts

The real Zen of the old Chinese masters was wu-shih, or "no fuss." ~ Alan Watts

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

Essentially Satori is a sudden experience, and it is often described as a "turning over" of the mind, just as a pair of scales will suddenly turn over when a sufficient amount of material has been poured into one pan to overbalance the weight in the other. Hence it is an experience which generally occurs after a long and concentrated effort to discover the meaning of Zen. ~ Alan Watts

Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. ~ Alan Watts

In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way. ~ Alan Watts

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity. ~ Alan Watts

In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life. ~ Alan Watts

I want ... to consort with people whose emotions are not ... cold and standoffish. ~ Alan Watts

Do you define yourself as a victim of the world? Or, as the world? ~ Alan Watts

In Hindu philosophy the whole creation is regarded as the Vishnu Lila, the play of Vishnu. Lila means dance or play. Also in Hindu philosophy, they call the world illusion; and in Latin the root of the word illusion is ludere, to play. ~ Alan Watts

Self-improvement is a dangerous form of vanity. ~ Alan Watts

Evil" read backwards is "live." Demon est deus inversus. ~ Alan W. Watts

To feel life is meaningless unless "I" can be permanent is like having desperately fallen in love with an inch. ~ Alan Watts

A holy person is someone who is whole; who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites. ~ Alan Watts

Now, you see, if you understand what I'm saying, with your intelligence, and then take the next step and say "But I understood it now, but I didn't feel it." Then, next I raise the question: Why do you want to feel it? You say: "I want something more", because that's again that spiritual greed. And you could only say that because you didn't understand it. ~ Alan Watts

So we down-to-earth, gutsy, tough, realistic, and practical types have just been squandering billions of dollars and unimaginable amounts of energy, nerve-work, and materials in whizzing off to the moon to discover, as astronomers knew before, that it was just a dreary slag heap. This is the true, original and scientifically etymological meaning of being lunatics. Crying for the moon. ~ Alan Watts

Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence. ~ Alan Watts

If a flower had a God it would not be a transcendental flower but a field. ~ Alan Watts

The sound of the rain needs no translation. In music one doesn't make the end of the composition the point of the composition ... Same way in dancing, you don't aim at one particular spot in the room ... The whole point of dancing is the dance. ~ Alan Watts

You can't get wet from the word 'water.' ~ Alan Watts

We are seeing, then, that our experience is altogether momentary. From one point of view, each moment is so elusive and so brief that we cannot even think about it before it has gone. From another point of view, this moment is always here, since we know no other moment than the present moment. It is always dying, always becoming past more rapidly than imagination can conceive. Yet at the same time it is always being born, always new, emerging just as rapidly from that complete unknown we call the future. Thinking about it almost makes you breathless. ~ Alan Watts

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

Running away from fear is fear; fighting pain is pain; trying to be brave is being scared ~ Alan Watts

I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek. ~ 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

Preliminary accounting, banking and surveying (known as arithmetic, algebra and geometry). ~ Alan Watts

We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you're dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played. ~ Alan Watts

You find out that the universe is a system that creeps up on itself and says 'Boo' and then laughs at itself for jumping. ~ Alan Watts

As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses. ~ Alan Watts

Substances like LSD, which give away a secret about the nature of the social game - the human game and what underlies it - are potentially dangerous, of course, like any good thing is. Electricity is dangerous, fire is dangerous, cars are dangerous, planes are dangerous, but not so dangerous as driving on the freeway. The only way to handle danger is to face it. If you start getting frightened of it, then you make it worse. Because you project onto it all kinds of bogeys and threats which don't exist in it at all. ~ Alan Watts

Religion is always falling apart. ~ Alan Watts

And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plowshares into swords ~ Alan Watts

Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it. ~ Alan Watts

"It is essential to understand this point thoroughly: that the thing-in-itself, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, is not only unknowable-it does not exist. This is important not only for sanity and peace of mind, but also for the most "practical" reasons of economics, politics, and technology.. This is not to say only that things exist in relation to one another, but that what we call "things" are no more than glimpses of a unified process. Certainly, this process has distinct features which catch our attention, but we must remember that distinction is not separation." ~ 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

There is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion. ~ Alan Watts

If we are not totally blind, what we are seeking is already here. This is it. ~ Alan Watts

Because here's the thing that's wrong with all of the "How to Be Happy" shit that's been shared eight million times on Facebook in the past few years - here's what nobody realizes about all of this crap: The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience. This is a total mind-fuck. So I'll give you a minute to unpretzel your brain and maybe read that again: Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience. It's what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as "the backwards law" - the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place. The ~ Mark Manson

We are not clear as to the role in life of these chemicals; nor are we clear as to the role of the physician. You know, of course, that in ancient times there was no clear distinction between priest and physician. ~ 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

All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head. ~ Alan Watts

We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves. ~ Alan Watts

More and more we try to effect an adaptation to life by means of external gadgets, and attempt to solve our problems by conscious thinking rather than unconscious 'know-how'. This is much less to our advantage than we like to suppose. ~ Alan Watts

Of course, you can't force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flatiron. Water becomes clear and calm only when left alone. ~ Alan Watts

Do you have any control over being conscious? Do you know how you will? ~ 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

These people, as far as I can see, do not congregate in the notorious centers of the movement, like the North Beach in San Francisco or Greenwich Village, or Venice, California. ~ Alan Watts

You can't have something without nothing. ~ Alan Watts

The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing. ~ Alan Watts

I feel cut off only because I am split within myself, because I try to be divided from my own feelings and sensations. What I feel and sense therefore seems foreign to me. And on being aware of the unreality of this division, the universe does not seem foreign any more.

For I am what I know; what I know is I. The sensation of a house across the street or of a star in outer space is no less I than an itch on the sole of my foot or an idea in my brain. ~ Alan W. Watts

There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service ofmankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hatingoneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love. ~ Alan Watts

Different Chinese philosophers, writing probably in 5-4 centuries B.C., presented some major ideas and a way of life that are nowadays known under the name of Taoism, the way of correspondence between man and the tendency or the course of natural world. ~ Alan Watts

This is what Zen means by being detached - not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water. ~ Alan Watts

Everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality ... ~ Alan Watts

Perhaps there is no other knowing than the mere competence of the act. If at the heart of one's being, there is no self to which one ought to be true, then sincerity is simply nerve; it lies in the unabashed vigor of the pretense. But pretense is only pretense when it is assumed that the act is not true to the agent. Find the agent. ~ Alan Watts

The police have enough work to keep them busy regulating automobile traffic, preventing robberies and crimes of violence and helping lost children and little old ladies find their way home. As long as the police confine themselves to such activities they are respected friends of the public. But as soon as they begin inquiring into people's private morals, they become nothing more than armed clergymen. ~ 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

In a relativistic universe you don't cling to anything, you learn to swim. And you know what swimming is - it's kind of a relaxed attitude with the water. In which you don't keep yourself afloat by holding the water, but by a certain giving to it. ~ Alan W. 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

Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we're not alone. ~ Alan Watts

Where does my fist go when I open up my hand? Where does my lap go when I stand up? ~ Alan Watts

There's an interdependence between flowers and bees. Where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees, there are no flowers. They are really one organism. And so in the same way, everything in nature depends on everything else. ~ Alan Watts

Our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don't learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life. ~ Alan Watts

Carried to its final extreme, the logical end of this type of reaction to life is suicide. The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead ~ Alan Watts

If you can't meditate in a boiler room, you can't meditate. ~ Alan Watts

They are enlightened who join in this play knowing it as play, for people suffer only because they take as serious what the gods made for fun. ~ Alan Watts

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

The Highest to which people can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes them wonder, let them be content; nothing higher can it give them, and nothing further should they seek for behind it; there is the limit. ~ Alan Watts

But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful. ~ Alan Watts

To go out of your mind once a day is tremendously important, because by going out of your mind you come to your senses. And if you stay in your mind all of the time, you are over rational, in other words you are like a very rigid bridge which because it has no give; no craziness in it, is going to be blown down by the first hurricane. ~ Alan Watts

Buddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent ... this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering. ~ Alan Watts

We do not feel that ordinarily, do we? What we feel, instead, is an identification of ourselves with our ideas of ourselves - I would rather say, with our image of ourselves. That is the person, or the ego. You play a role; you identify with that role. I play a role called Alan Watts. And I know very well that it is a big act. I can play some other roles besides Alan Watts if necessary, but I find this one is best for making a living. But I assure you that is a mask and I do not take it seriously. The idea of my being a kind of guru, or savior of the world just breaks me up, because I know me. Besides, it is very difficult to be holy, in the ordinary sense. ~ Alan W. Watts

When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of ... Nothing is left but to love. ~ Alan W. 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

Faith is a state of openness or trust. ~ Alan Watts

There is an ineffable mystery that underlies ourselves and the world. It is the darkness from which the light shines. When you recognize the integrity of the universe and that death is as certain as birth, then you can relax and accept that this is the way it is. There is nothing else to do. ~ Alan Watts

Your soul isn't in your body; your body is in your soul! ~ Alan Watts

The world is in an extremely dangerous situation, and serious diseases often require the risk of a dangerous cure like the Pasteur serum for rabies. ~ Alan Watts

What are we saying when we say now, something is holy? That means you should take a different attitude to what you are doing than if you were, for example, doing it for kicks. ~ Alan Watts

The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called "model agnosticism" and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski, the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, "The map is not the territory." Alan Watts, a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy, restated it more vividly as "The menu is not the meal. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen. ~ Alan Watts

There is a deep, peaceful calm in the dawning of a new day. ~ Alan Watts

Any systems approaching perfect self-control also approaches perfect self-frustration. ~ Alan Watts

For when you see that the universe cannot be distinguished from how you act upon it, there is neither fate nor free will, self nor other. There is simply one all-inclusive Happening, in which your personal sensation of being alive occurs in just the same way as the river flowing and the stars shining far out in space. There is no question of submitting or accepting or going with it, for what happens in and as you is no different from what happens as it. ~ Alan Watts

The Art of Being: A state of wholeness in which the mind functions freely and easily, without the sensation of a second mind or ego standing over it with a club. ~ Alan Watts

A living body is not a fixed thing but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool: the shape alone is stable, for the substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other. We are particularly and temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream that enters us in the form of light, heat, air, water, milk, bread, fruit, beer, beef Stroganoff, caviar, and pate de foie gras. It goes out as gas and excrement - and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, war, poetry, and music. And philosophy. ~ Alan Watts

When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. ~ Alan Watts

The point is seeing that THIS - the immediate, everyday and present experience - is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe. I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter ... ~ Alan Watts

You know that if you get in the water and have nothing to hold on to, but try to behave as you would on dry land, you will drown. But if, on the other hand, you trust yourself to the water and let go, you will float. And this is exactly the situation of faith. ~ Alan Watts

As the fish doesn't know water, people are ignorant of space. Consciousness is concerned only with changing and varying details; it ignores constants-especially constant backgrounds. Thus only very exceptional people are aware of what is basic to everything. ~ Alan Watts

We tend to regard ourselves as puppets of the Past, driven along by something that is always behind us. ~ Alan Watts

What are plants doing? What are plants all about? They serve human beings by being decorative, but what is it from its own point of view? It's using up air; it's using up energy. It's really not doing anything except being ornamental. And yet here's this whole vegetable world, cactus plants, trees, roses, tulips, and edible vegetables, like cabbages, celery, lettuce - they're all doing this dance. ~ Alan Watts

What keeps us from happiness is our inability to fully inhabit the present ~ Alan Watts

Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person. ~ Alan Watts