91 Alan Watts Quotes

Alan Wilson Watts was an English writer, speaker, and self-styled “philosophical entertainer”, known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience. Here are the best Alan Watts Quotes to inspire you.

Alan Watts Quotes

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

2. “Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.” – Alan Watts

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

4. “You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.” – Alan Watts
5. “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
6. “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
7. “Don’t be afraid. You’re going to make it, but it’s always going to feel as if you’re not. That’s the fun, you see! Alan Watts
8. “Hurry, and all that it involves, is fatal.” – Alan Watts
9. “One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.” – Alan Watts
10. “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
11. “If you make where you are going more important than where you are, there may be no point in going.” – Alan Watts
12. “Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.” – Alan Watts
13. “Faith is, above all, openness; an act of trust in the unknown.” – Alan Watts
14. “If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives we may forget altogether to live them.” – Alan Watts
15. “You are free to abandon yourself to actual life.” – Alan Watts
16. “If you happen to be sitting, just sit. If you are smoking a pipe, just smoke it. If you are thinking out a problem, just think. But don’t think and reflect unnecessarily, compulsively, from sheer force of nervous habit. In Zen, they call this having a leaky mind.” – Alan Watts
17. “We must grab what we can while we can, and drown out the realization that the whole thing is futile and meaningless.” – Alan Watts
18. “The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” – Alan Watts
19. “Much of the secret of life consists in knowing how to laugh, and also how to breathe.” – Alan Watts
20. “We need, above all things, to slow down and get ourselves to amble through life instead of to rush through it.” – Alan Watts
21. “Wherever the past is dropped away and safety abandoned, life is renewed.” – Alan Watts
22. “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
23. “As soon as we free ourselves from the mirage of hurrying time, we are alive again, as in childhood, to the ecstasies of ordinary life.” – Alan Watts
24. “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
25. “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
26. “The miracles of technology cause us to live in a hectic, clockwork world that does violence to human biology.” – Alan Watts
27. “The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.” – Alan Watts
28. “You can’t live at all unless you can live fully now.” – Alan Watts
29. “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
30. “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
31. “The most important thing in human life for one’s sanity is to be able to be playful or to be able to do things which are sublimely useless.” – Alan Watts
32. “We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end. […] 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.” – Alan Watts
33. “Poor humans, skillful beyond all other animals by being able to think in time. In knowing the future, they die before they’re dead, they shriek from the shark’s teeth before it has bitten, they dread the alien germ long long before its banquet begins.” – Alan Watts
34. “Those who sit quietly and do nothing are making one of the best possible contributions to a world in turmoil.” – Alan Watts
35. “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.” – Alan Watts
36. “It is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.” – Alan Watts
37. “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.” – Alan Watts
38. “We need more light. Light, here, means awareness – to be aware of life, of experience as it is at this moment, without any judgments or ideas about it.” – Alan Watts
39. “So long as the mind believes in the possibility of escape from what it is at this moment, there can be no freedom.” – Alan Watts
40. “There is no method to arrive at the place where you are.” – Alan Watts
41. “The only point of dancing is to dance.” – Alan Watts
42. “You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.” – Alan Watts
43. “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.” – Alan Watts
44. “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
45. “When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.” – Alan Watts
46. “It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about ‘I’.” – Alan Watts
47. “Lacking self-acceptance, we are always at odds with our point of departure, always doubting the ground on which we stand, always so divided against ourselves that we cannot act with sincerity.” – Alan Watts
48. “Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.” – Alan Watts
49. “Become what you are.” – Alan Watts
50. “It has been said that the highest wisdom lies in detachment.” – Alan Watts
51. “If a man seeks the Buddha, that man loses the Buddha.” – Alan Watts
52. “Zen has no goal; it is a traveling without point, with nowhere to go. To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead.” – Alan Watts
53. “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
54. “A certain amount of “sitting just to sit” might well be the best thing in the world for the jittery minds and agitated bodies.” – Alan Watts
55. “Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.” – Alan Watts
56. “A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.” – Alan Watts
57. “Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.” – Alan Watts
58. “Human desire tends to be insatiable.” – Alan Watts
59. “The frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering.” – Alan Watts
60. “Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared.” – Alan Watts
61. “To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot.” – Alan Watts
62. “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
63. “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.” – Alan Watts
64. “There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.” – Alan Watts
65. “Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.” – Alan Watts
66. “Human beings appear to be happy just so long as they have a future to which they can look forward.” – Alan Watts
67. “The undivided mind is free from this tension of trying always to stand outside oneself and to be elsewhere than here and now. Each moment is lived completely, and there is thus a sense of fulfillment and completeness.” – Alan Watts
68. “We confuse happiness with status.” – Alan Watts
69. “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.” – Alan Watts
70. “Peace can be made only by those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love.” – Alan Watts
71. “Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be.” – Alan Watts
72. “Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.” – Alan Watts
73. “Understanding comes through awareness.” – Alan Watts
74. “Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.” – Alan Watts
75. “Bring me a wave separate from the ocean and I will show you a person separate from the universe.” – Alan Watts
76. “Spirituality needs a beer and a loud burp. Sensuality needs a rough blanket and a hard bed and a cold night with the stars.” – Alan Watts
77. “We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.” – Alan Watts
78. “Man seems to be unable to live without myth, without the belief that the routine and drudgery, the pain and fear of this life have some meaning and goal in the future.” – Alan Watts
79. “Detachment means to have neither regrets for the past nor fears for the future; to let life take its course without attempting to interfere.” – Alan Watts
80. “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.” – Alan Watts
81. “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
82. “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” – Alan Watts
83. “The difficulty of describing things for Western ears is that people in a hurry cannot feel.” – Alan Watts
84. “The principal thing is to understand that there is no safety or security.” – Alan Watts
85. “Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.” – Alan Watts
86. “Nirvana is where you are, provided you don’t object to it.” – Alan Watts
87. “All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head.” – Alan Watts
88. “No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.” – Alan Watts
89. “By holding his breath, he loses it. By letting it go he finds it.” – Alan Watts
90. “The only way to get the truth is to not believe anything.” – Alan Watts
91. “The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around; the real, deep down you is the whole universe.” – Alan Watts