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Alan Watts Quotes

Total quotes: 33
“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”
— Alan Watts, The Way of Zen
Tagged: Universe, Deep, Profound, humanity, humans
“In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.”
— Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Tagged: Existence, Nature, world and humanity, Human Consciousness
“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 environment.”
— Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Tagged: Lessons, Social, environment, influence
“The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”
— Alan Watts, The Best Alan Watts Quotes
Tagged: Life, Permanence, Change, Living
“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.”
— Alan Watts, Become What You Are
Tagged: humanity, Understanding, Anxiety, Reputation, Identity
“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
— Alan Watts, The Essential Alan Watts
Tagged: Self-awareness, Complexity, definition
“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.”
— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
“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 Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy
“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.”
— Alan Watts, The Way of Zen
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy
“The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually ‘grasp’ reality.”
— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Tagged: Science, Religion, Reality, Perception
“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.”
— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Tagged: Fear, Depression, Boredom, Labels
“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.”
— Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Tagged: Intelligence, Personality, Identity, Self-Perception
“Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”
— Alan Watts, The Way of Zen
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy
“If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.”
— Alan Watts, Alan W Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Tagged: Nihilism, humanity, The Universe, Reality, Perception
“If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.”
— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Tagged: Belief, God, Religion, Faith, Spirituality
“Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown.”
— Alan Watts, The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Tagged: Intellect, Faith, Religion, Belief, The Unknown
“If you know what you want, and will be content with it, you can be trusted. But if you do not know, your desires are limitless and no one can tell how to deal with you. Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.”
— Alan Watts, The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Tagged: Identity, Joy, Happiness, Trust, Distrust, desires, Satisfaction
“Most civilized people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it with the world as they think about it and talk about it and describe it.”
— Alan Watts, The Essence Of Alan Watts
Tagged: Reality, Symbolism, meditation, Truth, Perception, Living, Life
“God is unknown to those who know him, and is known to those who do not know him at all.”
— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Tagged: Religion, God, Spirituality
“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.”
— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
“The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.”
— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
Tagged: Philosophy, Psychology, Emotional Intelligence
“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 Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
“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.”
— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Tagged: Thought, Anxiety, Pain, Suffering, Running Away, Fear, Consciousness, Mind
“Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.”
— Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness
Tagged: Consciousness, The Self, Identity, Navel-Gazing, Self-Analysis, Personality
“To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.”
— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy
“The menu is not the meal.”
— Alan Watts, Twitter
Tagged: Life, Choice, Exploration, Making Decisions
“Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.”
— Alan Watts, You Know Nothing Until You Remember
Tagged: Reality, Perception, Life
“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.”
— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
Tagged: Philosophy, Psychology, The Person You'll Become, Emotional Intelligence, Presence
“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.”
— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy
“The question 'what shall we do about it' is only asked by those who do not understand the problem. If a problem can be solved at all, to understand it and to know what to do about it are the same thing. On the other hand, doing something about a problem which you do not understand is like trying to clear away darkness by thrusting it aside with your hands. When light is brought, the darkness vanishes at once. This applies particularly to the problem.”
— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Tagged: Lightness and Darkness, Problem Solving, confusing
“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 form the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see its 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.”
— Alan Watts, Become What You Are
Tagged: The Past, The Present, forgiveness, Change, Meaning
“It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually--if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning-- you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as--Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so--I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it.”
— Alan Watts, The Way of Zen
Tagged: Life, The Universe, Big Bang, Identity, Individuality, Collectivism
“We fail so easily to see the difference between fear of the unknown and respect for the unknown, thinking that those who do not hasten in with bright lights and knives are deterred by a holy and superstitious fear. Respect for the unknown is the attitude of those who, instead of raping nature, woo her until she gives herself. But what she gives, even then, is not the cold clarity of the surface but the warm inwardness of the body - a mysteriousness which is not merely a negation, a blank absence of knowledge, but that positive substance which we call wonderful.”
— Alan Watts, Nature, Man and Woman
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy
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