Alan Watts Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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How did you know you're alive, unless you'd once been dead?

Alan Watts
Let the fool persist in his folly so that he will become wise.

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

Alan Watts
People become concerned with being more humble than other people.

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

Alan Watts
Choice is the act of hesitation that we make before making a decision.

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

Alan Watts
You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

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

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

Alan Watts
There is no coming toward it or going away from it; it is, and you are it.

Alan Watts
To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.

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

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

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

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

Alan Watts
Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair.

Alan Watts
The hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests.

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

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

Alan Watts
Sex is no longer a serious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more about it than adults.

Alan Watts
Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

Alan Watts
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

Alan Watts
What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born.

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

Alan Watts
The more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love.

Alan Watts
It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.

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

Alan Watts
To remain caught up in ideas and words about Zen is, as the old masters say, to stink of Zen.

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

Alan Watts