150+ Best & Famous Alan Watts Quotes
Alan Watts Quotes
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. -Allan Watts
“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.” – Alan Watts.
“When you are angry, you feel violent. And anger does not change anything in the world. Anger is used to change your perception. It’s an illusion.” -Alan Watts
“I don’t know if it matters what I think of myself. But I’ll tell you something that does matter: how much my children think of me, whether they look up to me as a father.” -Alan Watts
“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.” – Alan Watts
“One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.” – Alan Watts.
I didn’t come into this world just to live for myself, I came here to make an impact so that everything would be different when I left.” -Alan Watts
“Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.” – Alan Watts
“The only reason we are aware of anything is because it distracts us from what’s going on right here, right now.” -Alan Watts
“You can’t be too quick to judgment. You have to have the courage to do nothing.”
“When you are angry, you feel violent. And anger does not change anything in the world. Anger is used to change your perception. It’s an illusion.” -Alan Watts
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” -Alan Watts
“The only reason we’re here is because of a curve in space.” -Alan Watts
“Life is nothing more than an opportunity for action.” -Alan Watts
“You can’t see something by looking… you’ve got to look with .” -Alan Watts
“The world is the way it is because we believe the way we believe.” -Alan Watts
“Some people are fighting to have their own way, to have power over others; they’re in relationships with people who are trying to control and manipulate them. They have their own desire for power, control, and they’ve become strong as a result of that. But these people are not aware of what they’ve done. They make little progress in life because those weaknesses continue to haunt them and they find themselves in destructive relationships.
Alan Watts Quotes Death
Death is not the opposite of life, it’s the end of life.
Death is not a mysterious horror, it’s part of us and we have to live with it forever.
If you don’t like death, you’ll have to be contented living in the knowledge that death will come when you least expect it and not before time.
The only thing that I can assure is your own death – so why worry about someone else?
You’re afraid of dying, afraid of dying the way you are going to die. And if you cannot get over those fears, why go on living?
The only thing we know with any certainty is that death is certain. All else is speculation.
Be willing to die for what you think lives inside you and speaks to you when no one else can hear it.
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
You are never dead as long as you still “live on” in the memories of those you have touched.
Life is a temporary thing, but so is death.
The worst part of death isn’t the ending; it’s the stampeding herd of wild animals on their way to occupy your space.
Life is a process of breaking down and death is a process of going back, the same elements that compose the molecules of your body were at one time in the bellies of stars. Death is just an experimental way station to an ill-defined something that you cannot conceive of or imagine.
Life is what’s happening while you’re busy making other plans.
You’re not going to die of a cold, you’re going to die of pneumonia.
Death is the greatest mystery in the universe and the biggest problem in biology because it makes absolutely no sense with what we know about biology at all.
When you die, you will come back, but your brand-new body will be made up completely of atoms that had been dead for billions of years before they got in your body and new atoms extracted from dead stars will form your brain and eyes and all your other tissues.
Alan Watts Inspirational Quotes
“We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey.”
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
“What is the meaning of life? There’s no such thing as life because you’re alive!”
“Nature loves courage; though she may wound, she will conquer in the end.”
“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.”
“It’s basically only in your mind that time exists.”
“A healthy person is one who brings wholeness to their being, to their perception, to their thinking.”
“I encourage you not to be somebody, but to be yourself. And when you can be yourself, what happens? You stop interfering with the process of life itself. Life comes into you. Life flows through you. You feel it. And what happens? It gets stronger.”
“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
“Life is not merely a point to be made, but a process to be followed.”
“People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.”
“The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation but living in the present reality of it.”
“We are put on earth not to witness greatness, but to participate in it.”
“The mind is the slayer of the real.”
“We are part of this universe; we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us.”
“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles.”
“Money doesn’t carry happiness”
“Authentic spirituality means to be in the world but not of it.”
“The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keep out the joy.”
“Some people say that we are here to learn lessons, that life is a school. Well, it all sounds rather boring and when you look at the curriculum most schools offer you, it’s reasonably clear that learning is not their first priority.”
Alan Watts Quotes Life Is Not A Journey
Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
The whole point of becoming mature is just to become naive again — to regain that lost capacity for wonderment and amazement at what we read or hear or see or touch.
The pain of being alive is so astonishing. It never stops. It never lets up, and yet we go on, which is something that the dead don’t do. They don’t keep working; they don’t keep operating.
The inevitable delusion is that we are going to grow old, and then all of a sudden we will discover that life was not meant to be lived in this way, that it was just a horrible accident; and then we can die. But there’s no way to know. We don’t know why it happened.
We are living in a society that absolutely worships youth and has contempt for age, where every year you get older is another year of shame, another year you have sinned against the image. And that makes growing old a punishment for having been alive.
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.
Men have become the tools of their tools.
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
No one ever tells you that you are free. No one ever tells you that your salvation lies in absolute freedom – freedom from fear, from guilt, from judgment of yourself and others, but especially freedom from the past.
The only way out is through.
All I know is that I am not what I was before I knew this.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
Alan Watts Love Quotes
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
True love is not a feeling, but rather an attitude, and it’s far more serious than infatuation or romance. It is not enough that I love you; I must become a person capable of loving you in return.
Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense, and then allowing these two natural processes to merge together when they will.
The only reason people have for not entering into marriage is that they are afraid of its infirmity.
Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.
The best love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds. That’s what I hope to give you forever.
Perfect love means to love the one through whom one became unhappy.
I’m not a real movie star. I’m just a man who used to be able to afford movie-star prices.
Sometimes in order to feel the depth of life we have to risk almost drowning in it, and if you are not prepared to lose sight of the shore for a while, you might miss the magical wonders of the deep.
You know your love is true when you can say, “I do” with no reservations.
The love of God is the only power capable of raising a human being to the level at which he can feel his relationship with God as self-existing, not imposed upon him.
Love is friendship set on fire.
The most important thing in life isn’t the goal; it’s the change we go through to get there.
I love you because I need you—and because you need me, too…because we’re one terrible tragedy away from being each other’s nightmare.
It’s not that I’m in love with you. I’m in love with all the possibilities of being in love with you.
Love is when a relationship has to end because one or both people die.
Love is the suffering of springtime, the taste of summer, the feeling of an open space into which we feel we can move at any moment, for no reason other than that we are alive and free and fully alive.
Love is a very simple thing. It is not complex. But, to be loved is complex.
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable with passion for the one we love.
