Alan Watts Quotes

Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.

Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal, for the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever.

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.

... preliminary accounting, banking and surveying (known as arithmetic, algebra and geometry).

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.

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

There is only this now. It does not come from anywhere; it is not going anywhere. It is not permanent, but it is not impermanent. Though moving, it is always still. When we try to catch it, it seems to run away, and yet it is always here and there is no escape from it. And when we turn around to find the self which knows this moment, we find that it has vanished like the past.

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

Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.

Chaos is always losing, but never defeated

You can't have something without nothing.

The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery. We do not realize that our so-called love and concern for the individual is simply the other face of our own fear of death or rejection. In his exaggerated valuation of separate identity, the personal ego is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting, and then getting more and more anxious about the coming crash!

And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment.

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

We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible.

For the perfect accomplishment of any art, you must get this feeling of the eternal present into your bones - for it is the secret of proper timing. No rush. No dawdle. Just the sense of flowing with the course of events in the same way that you dance to music, neither trying to outpace it nor lagging behind. Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.

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.

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

Enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy... your entire education has has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.

The self-styled practical man of affairs who pooh-poohs philosophy as a lot of windy notions is himself a pragmatist or a positivist, and a bad one at that, since he has given no thought to his position.

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

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.

Increasingly, we're developing all kinds of systems for verifying reality by echoing it.

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.

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.

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.

To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end.

Basically, there is simply nothing to worry about, because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe.

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

If you are ready to wake up, you are going to wake up. If you're not you are going to stay pretending that you are just a poor little me.

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

The wake doesn't drive the ship

Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had.

Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are.

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

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.

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

To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it.

Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.

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.

Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.

The 'you' who you think you are does not exist.

To feel that life is meaningless unless “I” can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch.

I knew of a physicist at the University of Chicago who was rather crazy like some scientists, and the idea of the insolidity, the instability of the physical world impressed him so much that he used to go around in enormous padded slippers for fear he should fall through the floor.

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.

Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.