Alan Watts Quotes

240 Sourced Quotes

The animal tends to eat with his stomach, and the man with his brain. When the animal's stomach is full, he stops eating, but the man is never sure when to stop. When he has eaten as much as his belly can take, he still feels empty, he still feels an urge for further gratification.

Alan Watts
This present moment never comes to be and it never ceases to be, it is simply our minds that construct the continuity of thoughts we call time. In the present moment is nirvana.

Alan Watts
However much I may be impressed by the difference between a star and the dark space around it, I must not forget that I can see the two only in relation to each other, and that this relation is inseparable.

Alan Watts
It is also in despair of being able to understand or make any productive contribution to the highly organised chaos of our politico-economic system that large numbers of people simply abandon political and social committments. They just let society be taken over by a pattern of organisation which is as self-proliferative as a weed, and whose ends and values are neither human nor instinctive but mechanical.

Alan Watts
In Zen, poverty is voluntary, and considered not really as poverty so much as simplicity, freedom, unclutteredness.

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
To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.

Alan Watts
If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.

Alan Watts
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.

Alan Watts
Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart.

Alan Watts
The form of Christianity differs from the form of nature because in the Church and in its spiritual atmosphere we are in a universe that has been made. Outside the Church we are in a universe that has grown.

Alan Watts
When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be.

Alan Watts
At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but do not seem to make a "problem" of it.

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 naive idea that there is first of all empty space and then things filling it underlies the classical problem of how the world came out of nothing. Now the problem has to be rephrased, "How did something-and-nothing come out of... what?"

Alan Watts
Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery.

Alan Watts
We have allowed brain thinking to develop and dominate our lives.
As a consequence, we are at war within ourselves.
The brain desiring things which the body does not want, and the body desiring things which the brain does not allow; the brain giving directions which the body will not follow, and the body giving impulses which the brain cannot

Alan Watts
Zen is really extraordinarily simple as long as one doesn't try to be cute about it or beat around the bush! Zen is simply the sensation and the clear understanding... that there is behind the multiplicity of events and creatures in this universe simply one energy -- and it appears as you, and everything is it. The practice of Zen is to understand that one energy so as to "feel it in your bones.

Alan Watts
For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase—oddly enough—to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization.

Alan Watts
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.

Alan Watts
This-the immediate, everyday, and present experience-is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.

Alan Watts
We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can't slow down enough to enjoy them when they come.

Alan Watts
There are two specific objections to use of psychedelic drugs.First,use of these drugs may be dangerous.Howev er,every worth-while exploration is dangerous-climb ing mountains,testi ng aircraft,rocket ing into outer space,or collecting botanical specimens in jungles.But if you value knowledge & the actual delight of exploration more than mere duration of uneventful life,you are willing to take the risks.

Alan Watts
If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise; you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.

Alan Watts
Many people think that the Bible is the authentic word of God and they worship the Bible, making it an idol...

Alan Watts
It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about "I".

Alan Watts
A chest of gold coins or a fat wallet of bills is of no use
whatsoever to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft.

Alan Watts
Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.

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

Alan Watts
Life and death are not two opposed forces; they are simply two ways of looking at the same force, for the movement of change is as much the builder as the destroyer.

Alan Watts