If you’re looking for some words of wisdom, look no further than Alan Watts quotes. His insights will make you think about life in a whole new way.
Alan Watts was born in 1915 and died in 1973. He was a philosopher who is considered to be one of the most influential and widely read of the 20th century. He broke the mold of traditional philosophy and instead focused on the experience of the individual.
Alan Watts was a British philosopher who wrote extensively on Eastern philosophy and religion. He was one of the first Western scholars to introduce Eastern thought to the West, and his work continues to be influential to this day.
In his book The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts discusses the nature of the mind and its relationship to the world. He argues that the mind is constantly trying to create a sense of security by conceptualizing the world and its contents. However, this creates a false sense of security, as the mind can never fully understand or control the world. Watts therefore advocates an unorthodox approach to philosophy that eschews the pursuit of security and instead embraces insecurity.
Alan Watts Quotes
- “The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
2. “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
3. “To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.”
4. “Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
5. “Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”
6. “The menu is not the meal.”
7. “Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.”
8. “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.”
9. “Belief clings, but faith lets go.”
10. “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.”
11. “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
12. “Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.”
13. “If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself – so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed”
Consciousness Alan Watts quotes
14. “The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.”
15. “Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.”
16. “No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.”
17. “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.”
18. “I owe my solitude to other people.”
19. “When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.”
20. “The source of all light is in the eye.”
21. “If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.”
22. “To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead, for as our own proverb says, “To travel well is better than to arrive.”
23. “It’s better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing, than a long life spent in a miserable way.”
24. “It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.”
25. “Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.”
26. “If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.”
Inspirational Alan Watts quotes
27. “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.”
28. “You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.”
29. “A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.”
30. “Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.”
31. “And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words… As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.”
32. “Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.”
33. “You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.”
34. “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.”
35. “The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”
36. “Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe. ”
37. “Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.”
38. “You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.”
39. “We know that from time to time, there arise among human beings, people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.”
Alan Watts quotes the meaning of life
40. “Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”
41. “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.”
42. “Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick. ”
43. “I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.”
44. “Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.”
45. “People become concerned with being more humble than other people.”
46. “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.”
47. “a man does not really begin to be alive until he has lost himself, until he has released the anxious grasp which he normally holds upon his life, his property, his reputation and position.”
48. “One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.”
49. “Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.”
50. “What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.”
51. “Your body does not eliminate poisons by knowing their names. To try to control fear or depression or boredom by calling them names is to resort to superstition of trust in curses and invocations. It is so easy to see why this does not work. Obviously, we try to know, name, and define fear in order to make it “objective,” that is, separate from “I.”
52. “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.”
53. “The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from the giant pine, which lives for a thousand years.”