Alan W. Watts Quotes

The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.

~ Alan W. 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 it is play.

~ Alan W. Watts

The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.

~ Alan W. Watts

If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid.

~ Alan W. Watts

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

~ Alan W. Watts

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

~ Alan W. Watts

The menu is not the meal.

~ Alan W. Watts

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

~ Alan W. Watts

What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are coins for real things.

~ Alan W. Watts

In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.

~ Alan W. Watts

when somebody plays music, you listen. you just follow those sounds, and eventually you understand the music. the point can't be explained in words because music is not words, but after listening for a while, you understand the point of it, and that point is the music itself. in exactly the same way, you can listen to all experiences.

~ Alan W. Watts

But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence which does not work according to plan, according to a one-at-a-time order of thought. Yet the concrete evidence of such an intelligence is right to hand in our own thoughtlessly ordered bodies. For the Tao does not 'know' how it produces the universe just as we do not 'know' how we construct our brains.

~ Alan W. Watts

Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.

~ Alan W. Watts

Philosophers, for example, often fail to recognize that their remarks about the universe apply also to themselves and their remarks. If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so.

~ Alan W. Watts

I have always thought that all philosophical debates are ultimately between the partisans of structure and the partisans of goo.

~ Alan W. Watts

Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated

~ Alan W. Watts

Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy and you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, ‘My goodness, I’ve just discovered that I’m God,’ they’ll laugh and say, ‘Oh, congratulations, at last you found out.

~ Alan W. Watts

It is interesting that Hindus, when they speak of the creation of the universe do not call it the work of God, they call it the play of God, the Vishnu lila, lila meaning play. And they look upon the whole manifestation of all the universes as a play, as a sport, as a kind of dance — lila perhaps being somewhat related to our word lilt

~ Alan W. Watts

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

~ Alan W. Watts

Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that I and all other things now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them - to know it now as surely as if you had just fallen off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Indeed you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it's no help to cling to the rocks falling with you. 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 W. Watts

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

~ Alan W. Watts

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.

~ Alan W. Watts

A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.

~ Alan W. Watts

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

~ Alan W. Watts

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

~ Alan W. Watts

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

~ Alan W. 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 W. Watts

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.

~ Alan W. Watts

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.

~ Alan W. Watts

Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge construction, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise so long as their progress is considered piecemeal, endlessly having the distance between them. However, as it is not Achilles but the method of measurement which fails to catch up with the tortoise, so it is not man but his method of thought which fails to find fulfillment in experience.

~ Alan W. Watts

We might 'conquer' nature if we could first, or at the same time, conquer our own nature, though we do not see that human nature and 'outside' nature are all of a piece.

~ Alan W. Watts

W might 'conquer' nature if we could first, or at the same time, conquer our own nature, though we do not see that human nature and 'outside' nature are all of a piece.

~ Alan W. Watts

God is the Self of the world, but you can't see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can't see your own eyes, and you certainly can't bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding.

~ Alan W. Watts

Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that I and all other things now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them - to know it now as surely as if you had just fallen off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Indeed you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it's no help to cling to the rocks falling with you. 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.

~ Alan W. Watts

Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed will be far less destructive, because the aggressor will be careful not to destroy what he is fighting to capture. Reasonable - that is, human - men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life.

~ Alan W. Watts

Not long ago Congress voted, with much patriotic rhetoric, for the imposition of severe penalties upon anyone presuming to burn the flag of the United States. Yet the very Congressmen who passed this law are responsible, by acts of commission or omission, for burning, polluting, and plundering the territory that the flag is supposed to represent. Therein, they exemplified the peculiar andperhaps fatal fallacy of civilization: the confusion of symbol with reality.

~ Alan W. Watts

People become concerned with being more humble than other people.

~ Alan W. Watts

Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body, he 'has' a body. Instead of living and loving he 'has' instincts for survival and copulation.

~ Alan W. Watts

When it comes down to it, government is simply an abandonment of responsibility on the assumption that there are people, other than ourselves, who really know how to manage things. But the government, run ostensibly for the good of the people, becomes a self-serving corporation. To keep things under control it proliferates laws of ever-increasing complexity and unintelligibility, and hinders productive work by demanding so much accounting on paper that the record of what has been done becomes more important than what has actually been done. The Taoist moral is that people who mistrust themselves and one another are doomed.

~ Alan W. Watts

Money alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy.

~ Alan W. Watts