This post lists some of the all-time best quotes from Alan Watts. Enjoy!
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.
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Post Contents:
- Meaning of Life & Art of Living Quotes
- Ego, Anxiety, & Insecurity Quotes
- Busyness, Slowing Down, & Presence Quotes
- Knowing Yourself Quotes
- Paradoxes Quotes
- Wu Wei Quotes
50+ Alan Watts Quotes on the Meaning of Life, Knowing Yourself, Slowing Down, & More
Alan Watts Quotes on Meaning of Life & 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
“Life is not a problem to be solved, nor a question to be answered. Life is a mystery to be experienced.” — 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
“The meaning—as well as the existence—of an individual person, an organism, is in relation to the context. You are what you are, sitting here at this moment, in your particular kind of clothes, and with the particular colors of your faces, and your particular personalities, your family involvements, your business involvements, your neuroses, and your everything—you are that precisely in relation to an extremely complex environment.” — Alan Watts
“No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve in quality as it goes along or that the whole object of playing it 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.” — Alan Watts
“This is the real secret of life: to be completely engaged with what you’re doing in the here and now—and instead of calling it work, realize that this is play.” — Alan Watts
“To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.” — Alan Watts
Alan Watts Quotes on Ego, Anxiety, & Insecurity
“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
“No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.” — Alan Watts
“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.” — Alan Watts
“A thing is a think … It’s a unit of thought.” — Alan Watts
“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.” — Alan Watts
“Faith is, above all, openness; an act of trust in the unknown.” — Alan Watts
“Belief clings, but faith lets go.” — Alan Watts
“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
“When you’re ready to wake up, you’re going to wake up. And if you’re not ready, you’re going to stay pretending that you’re just ‘poor little me.'” — Alan Watts
“Before we think of doing anything in this critical situation, we must realize the completely illusory nature of the beings that we think we are and get back again to the beings that we really are.” — Alan Watts
“You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.” — 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
“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
“Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home.” — Alan Watts
“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.” — 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
“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 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
“If we are honest with ourselves, the most fascinating problem in the world is, ‘Who am I?’ What do you mean, what do you feel, when you say the word ‘I’? I do not think there can be any more fascinating preoccupation than that because it’s so mysterious, so elusive.” — Alan Watts
“If you’re perfectly honest about loving yourself (and you don’t pull any punches, you don’t pretend that you’re anything other than exactly what you are), you suddenly come to discover that the self you love—if you really go into it—is the universe.” — Alan Watts
“The individual and the universe are inseparable.” — Alan Watts
“What you are basically—deep, deep down, far, far in—is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.” — Alan Watts
“What you do is what the universe does, and what the universe does is also what you do … What you are is the universe—in fact, the works; what there is, and always has been, and always will be for ever and ever—performing an act called John Doe.” — Alan Watts
“All you see is what goes on that is happening of itself. You’re breathing, the wind is blowing, the trees are waving, your blood is circulating, your nerves are tingling. It’s all going on of itself. That’s you. That’s the real you—the you that goes on of itself … When we stop, we find a world that is happening rather than being done—and that happening, as distinct from doing, is our fundamental Self.” — Alan Watts
“Everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality … ‘God’ in the sense of being the Self, the deep-down basic whatever-there-is.” — Alan Watts
“We just decide without having the faintest understanding of how we do it … For a decision—the freest of my actions—just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.” — Alan Watts
“You are something that the whole world is doing.” — 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
“We have lamentably one-track minds in an infinitely many-tracked universe, and we may have to come to the alarming conclusion that the universe is smarter than we are.” — Alan Watts
“You cannot get an intelligent organism, such as a human being, out of an unintelligent universe.” — 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
“In the world, everything is happening all together everywhere at once, and meanwhile we, with our myopic little minds, are working it out step by step.” — Alan Watts
“Trying to understand the world purely by thinking about it is as clumsy a process as trying to drink the Pacific Ocean out of a pint beer mug.” — Alan Watts
“The fundamental ultimate mystery, the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets, is this: for every outside there is an inside, and for every inside there is an outside. And, although they are different, they go together. In other words, there is a secret conspiracy between all insides and all outsides. The conspiracy is this: to look as different as possible and yet underneath to be identical because you don’t find one without the other.” — 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
“What is conflict at one level of magnification is harmony at a higher level … Some human beings have broken through to that vision … where they see the apparent disintegration and disorganization of everyday life as the functioning of a totality which, at its level, is completely harmonious.” — Alan Watts
“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.” — Alan Watts
“So long as you’re in the present, there aren’t any problems.” — 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 consequences of a misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune … You never know the chain, the pattern, the connection, between events.” — Alan Watts
“There is no such thing as a single, solitary event. The only possible single event is all events whatsoever. That could be regarded as the only possible atom; the only possible single thing is everything.” — Alan Watts
“A basic problem we’ve got to go through first is to understand that there are no such things as things—that is to say, separate things or separate events. That is only a way of talking. If you can understand this, you’re going to have no further problems.” — Alan Watts
“There’s no ‘we’ that dances, there’s just the dancing.” — Alan Watts
“Every tiniest little thing that comes into being—every minute little fruit fly, or gnat, or bacterium—I will go so far as to say is an event upon which this whole cosmos depends.” — Alan Watts
“Just as the flower is a flowering of the field, I feel myself as a personing, a manning, a peopleing of the whole universe.” — Alan Watts
“What you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call here and now. You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.” — Alan Watts
“You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean. The ocean waves and the universe peoples.” — 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
Alan Watts Quotes on Wu Wei
“Many think that wu wei means ‘do nothing’ in the sense of laissez-faire, be lazy, always be passive. It doesn’t mean that. There is a time for action.” — Alan Watts
“Wu means non, not, no, negation. Wei has a combination of meanings. It can mean action, making, but the best translation I have found for it is forcing. So, wu wei is the principle of not forcing in anything that you do … It’s often called not doing, not acting, not interfering—but not to force seems to me to hit the nail on the head.” — Alan Watts
“Always to act in accordance with the pattern of things as they exist. Don’t impose on any situation … It would be better to do nothing than to interfere without knowing the system of relations that exists. It’s terribly important to have this feeling of the interdependence of every form of life upon every other form of life.” — Alan Watts
“Apply this ‘not forcing anything’ and you get spontaneity—a life which is so of itself, which is natural, which is not forced, which is not unduly self-conscious.” — Alan Watts
“The real wu wei is not intentionally wu wei, and so is wu wei. But, inferior wu wei so tries to be wu wei that it isn’t.” — Alan Watts
“Wu wei is based on knowledge of the tide—the drift of things. Get with it. Wu wei is the art of sailing rather than the art of rowing.” — Alan Watts
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