Top 506 Quotes & Sayings by Alan Watts - Page 2

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

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

We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we're in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back from the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see it's like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that...Also, watch the flow of music. The melody as its expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence...you wait till later to find out what the sentence means...The present is always changing the past.

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.

As muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone, it could be argued that those who sit quietly and do nothing are making one of the best possible contributions to a world in turmoil.

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

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

Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.

Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.

By going out of your mind, you come to your senses

You must not be afraid of playing wrong notes. Just forget it, play it wrong! But play!

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.

Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.

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

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.

For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, "Now, I've arrived!" Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.

People sometimes fail to live because they are always preparing to live.

The destination of life is this eternal moment.

The sound of the rain needs no translation.

Your soul isn't in your body; your body is in your soul!

The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the I out of the experience... Sanity, wholeness and integration lie in the realisation that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate I or mind can be found .... [Life] is a dance, and when you are dancing, you are not intent on getting somewhere. The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.

The truth is revealed by removing things that stand in its light, an art not unlike sculpture, in which the artist creates, not by building, but by hacking away.

Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.

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.

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.

When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.

You, yourself, are the eternal energy which appears as this Universe. You didn't come into this world; you came out of it. Like a wave from the ocean.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.

What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?

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

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.

We see what we believe rather than what we see.

We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.

To go out of your mind at least once a day is tremendously important. By going out of your mind, you come to your senses.

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.

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

Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure.

If you love a person, you say to that person, "Look, I love you, whatever that may be. I've seen quite a bit of it and I know there's lots that I haven't seen, but still it's you and I want you to be what you want to be. And I won't be happy if I've got you in a cage. You'd be a bird without song."

No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.

Self-improvement is a dangerous form of vanity.

Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.

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

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.

What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.

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

Time is a social institution and not a physical reality. There is no such thing as time in the natural world - the world of stars and waters, clouds, mountains and living organisms. There is such a thing as rhythm - rhythm of tides, rhythm of biological processes... There is rhythm and there is motion. Time is a way of measuring motion.

Do you see yourself as a victim of the world, or do you see yourself as the world?

When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there...You're looking at you.

When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique. He is universal by virtue of the inseparability of his organism from the cosmos. He is unique in that he is just this organism and not any stereotype of role, class, or identity assumed for the convenience of social communication.

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.

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.

Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.

Nothing is more creative than death, since it has the whole secret of life. It means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that 'I' cannot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. When a man knows this, he lives for the first time in his life. By holding his breath, he loses it. By letting go he finds it.

The only serious side-effect of #? marijuana is that you might get arrested.