Alan Watts Quotes

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

We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.

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

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

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

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.

No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

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

The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring there.

I owe my solitude to other people.

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.

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.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The only thing that ultimately matters is to eat an ice-cream cone, play a slide trombone, plant a small tree, good God, now you’re free.

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 an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

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

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

The ego is a way in which you can enjoy the world, and still find fault with it.

The menu is not the dinner.

You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.

We need a return to ourselves, a gratitude for what we ourselves are… embracing pain and pleasure as the emotional tags of self-being.

To live is to be musical, starting with the blood dancing in your veins. Everything living has a rhythm. Do you feel your music?

Life is a flowing process and the aim is not to cling to it and make it a permanent state, but rather to keep it flowing.

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.

I owe my solitude to other people.

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself.

You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.

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.

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.

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

You have nothing to prove and nothing to regret. You are perfect.

The only thing that ultimately matters is to eat an ice-cream cone, play a slide trombone, plant a small tree, good God, now you’re free.

There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins.

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

You are the eternal universe, you are vast and full.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now.

The brain is a very slow computer in comparison with the enormous rapidity of the electrochemical processes which go on in our nerves, consequently most of our decisions are made for us before we have become conscious of them.

We seldom realize that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own.

No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.

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

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.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

Just to the extent that you regard yourself as responsible for your ill fortune you also have to regard yourself as responsible for your good fortune.