Alan Watts was an thinker and writer who influenced many people in religion, philosophy, sociology, and psychology. He had an impressive career as an author, broadcaster, and public speaker.
Watts was born on 6 January 1915 in Southampton, England. He attended Oxford University, where he studied English literature before turning his focus to studying Eastern religions. After receiving his degree in philosophy from Oxford, he traveled to India, where he spent four years studying Sanskrit, Zen Buddhism, and Taoism before returning to the United States.
He is widely considered one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, with an estimated range of readership across a spectrum from academia to popular culture. His thoughts have had a significant impact on many people’s lives since he died in 1973.
The following are his most famous quotes that are mind-opening and inspire you to become more aware of yourself.
65 Alan Watts Quotes That Will Open Your Mind
“Love is not something that is a sort of rare commodity, everybody has it.”
“We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.”
“The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”
“Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.”
“The more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love.”
“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
“The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.”
“Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.”
“Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.”
“You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
“Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”
“Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up… now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.”
“Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now. 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.”
“You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.”
“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.”
“One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.”
“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way”
“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.”
I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in
“It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.”
“The source of all light is in the eye.”
“To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.”
“There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied.”
“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”
“The positive cannot exist without the negative.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“…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.”
“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.”
“You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. 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.”
Rigidity is just a synonym of boring, unnatural and narrow vision. In life it is essential to flow as water, this is why so many Eastern philosophers refer to water as a great teacher.
“Society is our extended mind and body.”
“When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the Gods made for fun.”
“Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.”
“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”
“Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time as much as patterns in space.”
“If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.”
“We notice only what we think noteworthy, and therefore our visions highly selective.”
“If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.”
“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.”
“But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.”
“Logic, intelligence, and reason are satisfied, but the heart goes hungry.”
“We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.”
“Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree.”
“A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.”
“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.”
“For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.”
“The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.”
“There will always be suffering. But we must not suffer over the suffering.”
“Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them.”
“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.”
“Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal, for the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever….”
“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
