This is a curated selection of Alan Watts quotes (personally curated by me on my own lifelong learning journey). This page is intended as a learning resource for educational purposes and only meant to offer an overview/introduction. Short quotes aren’t a substitute for source material, so if this page sparks your interest, explore more deeply by checking out Alan Watts’ books (Amazon).
Post Contents:
- Meaning of Life Quotes
- Ego, Anxiety, & Insecurity Quotes
- Busyness, Slowing Down, & Presence Quotes
- Knowing Yourself Quotes
- Paradoxes Quotes
25 Alan Watts Quotes on the Meaning of Life, Knowing Yourself, Slowing Down, & More
Alan Watts Quotes on the Meaning of Life
“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
“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
“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
“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
Alan Watts Quotes on Ego, Anxiety, & Insecurity
“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
“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.” — 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
“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
“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 need, above all things, to slow down and get ourselves to amble through life instead of to rush through it.” — 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
“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
Alan Watts Quotes on Knowing Yourself
“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
“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 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
“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
“Everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality … ‘God’ in the sense of being the Self, the deep-down basic whatever-there-is.” — Alan Watts
Alan Watts Quotes on Paradoxes
“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
“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.” — 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
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