Alan Watts Quotes: 35+ All-Time Best to Live the Most Meaningful Life

Alan Watts seems to be having a resurgence in the digital age. His audio lectures have millions of views on YouTube, his books have thousands of reviews on Amazon, and Alan Watts quotes on Instagram seem to get more engagement than anything else.

So, who was he?

Alan Watts was a writer and speaker primarily known for popularizing Eastern spirituality in the West—a “spiritual spokesperson” for the counterculture movement of the 1960s.

“I remember asking Alan why he was teaching. He just smiled at me, and pointed out the window, to a bird flying. There was no reason why he was teaching, he replied. He taught, he said, just as the bird flies.” — William Warren Bartley

When I asked people on Twitter what they like so much about Watts, here were some of the responses:

“His style is very easy to consume.”
“Humor and style. He’s genuinely entertaining, funny, as well as wise.”
“His ability to simplify concepts/theories and articulate them with amazing precision is what makes him so popular.”
“He tells truths directly and simply. He puts into words things you kinda knew but hadn’t found the words to express.”
“He brings the entire eastern spiritual tradition on these topics in an easy to understand/follow setting for a western mindset.”

If the quotes below spark your interest, you may want to check out these two Alan Watts books that are currently on my reading list:

The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (Amazon)
The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (Amazon)

35+ Alan Watts Quotes on the Meaning of Life, Knowing Yourself, Slowing Down, & More

Alan Watts Quotes on the Meaning of Life & the Art of Living

“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.” — Alan 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 Watts

“What do you desire? What makes you itch? … If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will 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 things you don’t like doing.” — Alan Watts

“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.” — Alan 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 Watts

Alan Watts Quotes on Ego, Anxiety, & Insecurity

“A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality & lives in a world of illusion.” — Alan Watts

“No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.” — Alan Watts

“Faith is, above all, openness; an act of trust in the unknown.” — Alan Watts

“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.” — Alan Watts

“As a matter of fact, you cannot compare this present experience with a past experience. You can only compare it with a memory of the past, which is a part of the present experience. When you see clearly that memory is a form of present experience, it will be obvious that trying to separate yourself from this experience is as impossible as trying to make your teeth bite themselves. To understand this is to realize that life is entirely momentary, that there is neither permanence nor security, and that there is no ‘I’ which can be protected.” — Alan Watts

“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.” — Alan Watts

“There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.” — Alan Watts

Alan Watts Quotes on Busyness, Slowing Down, & Presence

“There is no hurry, and in a way there is no future. It is all here — so take it easy, take your time, and get acquainted with it.” — Alan Watts

“The difficulty of describing things for Western ears is that people in a hurry cannot feel.” — Alan Watts

“We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can’t slow down enough to enjoy them when they come.” — Alan Watts

“We keep counting time. We have the sensation time is running out, and we bug ourselves with this. Time is nothing but an abstract measure of motion. We are living in an eternal now.” — Alan Watts

“We need, above all things, to slow down and get ourselves to amble through life instead of to rush through it.” — Alan Watts

“If you make where you are going more important than where you are, there may be no point in going.” — Alan Watts

“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.” — Alan Watts

“It is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.” — Alan Watts

Alan Watts Quotes on Knowing Yourself

“The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.” — Alan Watts

“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

“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

“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 Watts

“Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.” — Alan Watts

“You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.” — Alan Watts

“You are in relationships with the external world that, on the whole, are incredibly harmonious.” — Alan Watts

“All happenings are mutually interdependent in a way that seems unbelievably harmonious. Every this goes with every that. Without others there is no self, and without somewhere else there is no here, so that — in this sense — self is other and here is there.” — Alan Watts

“The relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.” — Alan Watts

Alan Watts Quotes on Paradoxes

“The fundamental, ultimate mystery – the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets – is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.” — Alan Watts

“Soon you will find that the so-called outside world and the so-called inside world come together. They are a happening. Your thoughts are happening, just like the sounds going on outside and everything is simply a happening and all you’re doing is watching it.” — Alan Watts

“Life is not a problem to be solved, nor a question to be answered. Life is a mystery to be experienced.” — Alan Watts

“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.” — Alan Watts

“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.” — Alan Watts

“It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd—uncanny and highly improbable.” — Alan Watts

“In the moment of death many people undergo the curious sensation not only of accepting but of having willed everything that has happened to them … not willing in the imperious sense; it is the unexpected discovery of an identity between the willed and the inevitable.” — Alan Watts

“The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad — because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.” — Alan Watts

“You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.” — Alan Watts