Alan watts quotes

The truth is revealed by removing things that stand in its light, an art not unlike sculpture, in which the artist creates, not by building, but by hacking away.

The biggest ego trip is getting rid of your ego, and of course the joke of it all is that your ego does not exist.

What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.

Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure.

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.

Basically, there is simply nothing to worry about, because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe.

But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.

Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.

The destination of life is this eternal moment.

When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there...You're looking at you.

By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us.

You can't get wet from the word 'water.'

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.

I too realize that the less I preach the more likely I am to be heard.

this present moment never comes to be and it never ceases to be, it is simply our minds that construct the continuity of thoughts we call time. In the present moment is nirvana.

A paradox is only a truth standing on its head to attract attention.

Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy and you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, ‘My goodness, I’ve just discovered that I’m God,’ they’ll laugh and say, ‘Oh, congratulations, at last you found out.

We are the eyes of the cosmos. So that in a way, when you look deeply into somebody's eyes, you're looking deep into yourself, and the other person is looking deeply into the same self.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings, the past and the future are not as real, but rather more real than the present.

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.

If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives we may forget altogether to live them.

It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.

Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we're not alone.

Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.

Self-improvement is a dangerous form of vanity.

Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.

The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.

The question is not what I should do in the future to get it, but rather, what am I presently doing that prevents me from realizing it right now?

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.

You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.

Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.

Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be

For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.

You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it.

You are the universe experiencing itself.

The wake doesn't drive the ship

No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.

There is only this now. It does not come from anywhere; it is not going anywhere. It is not permanent, but it is not impermanent. Though moving, it is always still. When we try to catch it, it seems to run away, and yet it is always here and there is no escape from it. And when we turn around to find the self which knows this moment, we find that it has vanished like the past.

Once you've learned to think you can't stop. And an enormous number of people devote their lives to keeping their minds busy and feel extremely uncomfortable with silence.

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.

But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.

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.

What keeps us from happiness is our inability to fully inhabit the present

If you love a person, you say to that person, "Look, I love you, whatever that may be. I've seen quite a bit of it and I know there's lots that I haven't seen, but still it's you and I want you to be what you want to be. And I won't be happy if I've got you in a cage. You'd be a bird without song."

The world is a marvelous system of wiggles.

Faith is, above all, openness; an act of trust in the unknown.

Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.

The 'you' who you think you are does not exist.

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between a causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality.

We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.

Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.

What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born.

Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up.

The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.

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.

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

The sound of the rain needs no translation.

Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it.

The real you is not a puppet that life pushes around, the real deep down you is the whole universe.

If you want to stay in a state of illusion, stay in it. But you can always wake up.

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.

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.

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.

If you are ready to wake up, you are going to wake up. If you're not you are going to stay pretending that you are just a poor little me.

Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.

Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it.

Enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy... your entire education has has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.

The menu is not the meal.

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing but things.

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.

Buddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent...this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering.

Man is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock ball that revolves about a small star at the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy. ... I am absolutely amazed to discover myself on this rock ball rotating around a spherical fire. It's a very odd situation. And the more I look at things I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird.

You, yourself, are the eternal energy which appears as this Universe. You didn't come into this world; you came out of it. Like a wave from the ocean.

The difference between a baby and adult is that a baby believes in everything while the adult doubts everything. Babies also only tell the truth until they learn what a lie is.

Of course, you can’t force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flatiron. Water becomes clear and calm only when left alone.

And so when the essential idea of love is lost there comes talk of fidelity. Actually, the only possible basis for two beings, male and female, to relate to each other is to grant each other total freedom.

We have a strange anxiety in us; that if we don't interfere then it won't happen. Now that's the root of an enormous amount of trouble.

In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.

Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.

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.

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 from the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see it's 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.

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.

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.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had.

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time

Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.

To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.

By going out of your mind, you come to your senses

What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?

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.

Chaos is always losing, but never defeated

Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.

This is what Zen means by being detached—not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.

If you insist on being determined by the past that's your game, but the fact of the matter is it all starts right now.

Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.

There's an interdependence between flowers and bees. Where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees, there are no flowers. They are really one organism. And so in the same way, everything in nature depends on everything else.

Running away from fear is fear; fighting pain is pain; trying to be brave is being scared

Truly great companies are built on ideals, not just deals.

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

People sometimes fail to live because they are always preparing to live.

The future is a concept, it doesn't exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is always now. That's one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now.

All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head.

Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.

Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.

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.

For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, "Now, I've arrived!" Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.

To go out of your mind once a day is tremendously important, because by going out of your mind you come to your senses. And if you stay in your mind all of the time, you are over rational, in other words you are like a very rigid bridge which because it has no give; no craziness in it, is going to be blown down by the first hurricane.

There is a deep, peaceful calm in the dawning of a new day.

You must not be afraid of playing wrong notes. Just forget it, play it wrong! But play!

It is the seeker, who understands there is more than what meets the eye, who is not afraid and makes the choice to go into the unknown. The process of awaking has begun, the discovery is underway.

Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment.

I owe my solitude to other people.

Nothing is more creative than death, since it has the whole secret of life. It means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that 'I' cannot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. When a man knows this, he lives for the first time in his life. By holding his breath, he loses it. By letting go he finds it.

We see what we believe rather than what we see.

To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end.

Your soul isn't in your body; your body is in your soul!

Don't hurry anything. Don't worry about the future. Don't worry about what progress you're making. Just be entirely content to be aware of what is.

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.

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

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.

Do you see yourself as a victim of the world, or do you see yourself as the world?