Alan Wilson Watts (January 6, 1915 – November 16, 1973) was a British-American philosopher, an author, a poet, a radical thinker, an ex-priest, a mystic, a teacher, and a critic of society. He interpreted and popularized Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. In this article, we collected the best Alan Watts quotes on the meaning of life, the world we live in, higher consciousness, the true nature of reality, the Universe, and the pursuit of happiness.
We hope you’ll be inspired by these Alan Watts quotes as much as we are!
So, here they are 65 Alan Watts quotes that will make you more aware of yourself and the world you live in!
65 Alan Watts Quotes
#1
“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
― Alan Watts
#2
“The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.”
― Alan Watts
#3
“Most of us assume as a matter of common sense that space is nothing, that it’s not important and has no energy. But as a matter of fact, space is the basis of existence. How could you have stars without space? Stars shine out of space and something comes out of nothing just in the same way as when you listen, in an unprejudiced way, you hear all sounds coming out of silence. It is amazing.
Silence is the origin of sound just as space is the origin of stars, and woman is the origin of man. If you listen and pay close attention to what is, you will discover that there is no past, no future, and no one listening. You cannot hear yourself listening. You live in the eternal now and you are that. It is really extremely simple, and that is the way it is.”
― Alan Watts
#4
You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.
― Alan Watts
#5
“For we have never actually understood the revolutionary sense beneath them – the incredible truth that what religion calls the vision of God is found in giving up any belief in the idea of God.”
― Alan Watts
#6
“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 a play.”
― Alan Watts
#7
“So you see, if you become aware of the fact that you are all of your own body, and that the beating of your heart is not just something that happens to you, but something you’re doing, then you become aware also in the same moment and at the same time that you’re not only
beating your heart, but that you are shining the sun. Why?
Because the process of your bodily existence and its rhythms is a process, an energy system which is continuous with the shining of the sun, just like the East River, here, is a continuous energy system, and all the waves in it are activities of the whole East River, and that’s continuous with the Atlantic Ocean, and that’s all one energy system and finally the Atlantic ocean gets around to being the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, etc., and so all the waters of the Earth are a continuous energy system.
It isn’t just that the East River is part of it. You can’t draw any line and say ‘Look, this is where the East River ends and the rest of it begins,’ as if you can in the parts of an automobile, where you can say ‘This is definitely part of the generator, here, and over here is a spark plug.’ There’s not that kind of isolation between the elements of nature.”
― Alan Watts
#8
A scholar tries to learn something every day; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
― Alan Watts
#9
“It is interesting that Hindus, when they speak of the creation of the universe do not call it the work of God, they call it the play of God, the Vishnu Lila, Lila meaning play. And they look upon the whole manifestation of all the universes as a play, as a sport, as a kind of dance — Lila perhaps being somewhat related to our word lilt.”
― Alan Watts
#10
“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”
― Alan Watts
#11
“Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit – to the “conquest” of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.”
― Alan Watts
#12
“Peace can be made only by those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love. No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.”
― Alan Watts
#13
“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.”
― Alan Watts
#14
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.
― Alan Watts
#15
“But the transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions. As Lao Tzu said, “The scholar gains every day, but the Taoist loses every day.”
― Alan Watts
#16
“When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of, nothing is left but to love.”
― Alan Watts
#17
“Whether we like it or not, change comes, and the greater the resistance, the greater the pain. Buddhism perceives the beauty of change, for life is like music in this: if any note or phrase is held for longer than its appointed time, the melody is lost. Thus Buddhism may be summed up in two phrases: “Let go!” and “Walk on!” Drop the craving for self, for permanence, for particular circumstances, and go straight ahead with the movement of life.”
― Alan Watts
#18
“Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.”
― Alan Watts
#19
“Money is a way of measuring wealth but is not wealth in itself. A chest of gold coins or a fat wallet of bills is of no use whatsoever to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft. He needs real wealth, in the form of a fishing rod, a compass, an outboard motor with gas, and a female companion. But this ingrained and archaic confusion of money with wealth is now the main reason we are not going ahead full tilt with the development of our technological genius for the production of more than adequate food, clothing, housing, and utilities for every person on earth.”
― Alan Watts
#20
“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”
― Alan Watts
#21
“Zen Buddhism is a way and a view of life which does not belong to any of the formal categories of modern Western thought. It is not religion or philosophy; it is not a psychology or a type of science. It is an example of what is known in India and China as a “way of liberation,” and is similar in this respect to Taoism, Vedanta, and Yoga. As will soon be obvious, a way of liberation can have no positive definition. It has to be suggested by saying what it is not, somewhat as a sculptor reveals an image by the act of removing pieces of stone from a block.”
― Alan Watts
#22
“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
#23
“To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead.”
― Alan Watts
#24
“A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.”
― Alan Wilson Watts
#25
“Imagine a multidimensional spider’s web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image.”
― Alan Watts
#26
“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.”
― Alan Watts
#27
“People can’t be talked out of illusions. If a person believes that the earth is flat, you can’t talk him out of that, he knows that it’s flat. He’ll go down to the window and see that it’s obvious, it looks flat. So the only way to convince him that it isn’t is to say, “Well let’s go and find the edge.”
― Alan Watts
#28
“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.”
― Alan Watts
#29
“If a man seeks the Buddha, that man loses the Buddha.”
― Alan Watts
#30
“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.”
― Alan Watts
#31
“A mind that is single and sincere is not interested in being good, in conducting relations with other people so as to live up to a rule. Nor, on the other hand, is it interested in being free, in acting perversely just to prove its independence.”
― Alan Watts
#32
“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.”
― Alan Watts
#33
“The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”
― Alan Watts
#34
“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 infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully 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 confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.”
― Alan Watts
#35
“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”
― Alan Watts
#36
“To Taoism that which is absolutely still or absolutely perfect is absolutely dead, for without the possibility of growth and change there can be no Tao. In reality, there is nothing in the universe which is completely perfect or completely still; it is only in the minds of men that such concepts exist.”
― Alan Watts
#37
“But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence which does not work according to plan, according to a one-at-a-time order of thought. Yet the concrete evidence of such intelligence is right to hand in our own thoughtlessly ordered bodies. For the Tao does not ‘know’ how it produces the universe just as we do not ‘know’ how we construct our brains.”
― Alan Watts
#38
“Much of the secret of life consists in knowing how to laugh, and also how to breathe.”
― Alan Watts
#39
“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.”
― Alan Watts
#40
“Only doubtful truths need defense.”
― Alan Watts
#41
“We have made a problem for ourselves by confusing the intelligible with the fixed. We think that making sense out of life is impossible unless the flow of events can somehow be fitted into a framework of rigid forms. To be meaningful, life must be understandable in terms of fixed ideas and laws, and these, in turn, must correspond to unchanging and eternal realities behind the shifting scene. But if this what “making sense out of life” means, we have set ourselves the impossible task of making fixity out of flux.”
― Alan Watts
#42
“In reality, there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it’s all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.”
― Alan Watts
#43
“There are, then, two ways of understanding an experience. The first is to compare it with the memories of other experiences, and so to name and define it. This is to interpret it in accordance with the dead and the past. The second is to be aware of it as it is, as when, in the intensity of joy, we forget past and future, let the present be all, and thus do not even stop to think, “I am happy.”
― Alan Watts
#44
“Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.”
― Alan Watts
#45
“Certainly the revolutionary thinker must go beyond thought. He knows that almost all his best ideas come to him when thinking has stopped. He may have struggled and struggled to understand a problem in terms of old ways of thinking, only to find it impossible. But when thought stops from exhaustion, the mind is open to see the problem as it is – not as it is verbalized – and at once it is understood.”
― Alan Watts
#46
“For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.”
― Alan Watts
#47
“When you are dying and coming to life in each moment, would-be scientific predictions about what will happen after death are of little consequence. The whole glory of it is that we do not know. Ideas of survival and annihilation are alike based on the past, on memories of waking and sleeping, and, in their different ways, the notions of everlasting continuity and everlasting nothingness are without meaning. It needs but slight imagination to realize that everlasting time is a monstrous nightmare, so that between heaven and hell as ordinarily understood there is little to choose.”
― Alan Watts
#48
“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.”
― Alan Watts
#49
“Paradox as it may seem, we likewise find life meaningful only when we have seen that it is without purpose, and know the “mystery of the universe” only when we are convinced that we know nothing about it at all.”
― Alan Watts
#50
“The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it with the world as they think about it and talk about it and describe it.
For, on the one hand, there is the real world and on the other, there is a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds. These are very very useful symbols, all civilization depends on them, but like all good things they have their disadvantages, and the principle disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth.”
― Alan Wilson Watts
#51
“You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meanings of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.”
― Alan Watts
#52
“We think that the world is limited and explained by its past. We tend to think that what happened in the past determines what is going to happen next, and we do not see that it is exactly the other way around! What is always the source of the world is the present; the past doesn’t explain a thing. The past trails behind the present like the wake of a ship and eventually disappears.”
― Alan Wilson Watts
#53
“To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.”
― Alan Watts
#54
“Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social environment.”
― Alan Watts
#55
“To put it 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. 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. We look for this security by fortifying and enclosing ourselves in innumerable ways.
We want the protection of being “exclusive” and “special,” seeking to belong to the safest church, the best nation, the highest class, the right set, and the “nice” people. These defenses lead to divisions between us, and so to more insecurity demanding more defenses. Of course, it is all done in the sincere belief that we are trying to do the right things and live in the best way; but this, too, is a contradiction.”
― Alan Watts
#56
“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
#57
“But nirvana is a radical transformation of how it feels to be alive: it feels as if everything were myself, or as if everything – including “my” thoughts and actions – were happening of itself. There are still efforts, choices, and decisions, but not the sense that “I make them”; they arise of themselves in relation to circumstances. This is, therefore, to feel life, not as an encounter between subject and object, but as a polarized field where the contest of opposites has become the play of opposites.”
― Alan Watts
#58
“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.”
― Alan Watts
#59
“Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated”
― Alan Watts
#60
“Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery — in morals, in art or in spirituality — the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with
someone else’s depth or failure.”
― Alan Watts
#61
“If then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.”
― Alan Watts
#62
“The answer to the problem of suffering is not away from the problem but in it. The inevitability of pain will not be met by deadening sensitivity but by increasing it, by exploring and feeling out the manner in which the natural organism itself wants to react and which its innate wisdom has provided.”
― Alan Watts
#63
“I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.”
― Alan Watts
#64
“The only way to make sense of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
― Alan Watts
#65
“When life is empty, with respect to the past, and aimless, with respect to the future, the vacuum is filled by the present – normally reduced to a hairline, a split second in which there is no time for anything to happen.”
― Alan Watts