Alan Watts Quotes

“To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.”

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

“More and more we try to effect an adaptation to life by means of external gadgets, and attempt to solve our problems by conscious thinking rather than unconscious 'know-how'. This is much less to our advantage than we like to suppose.”

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

“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.”

“One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.”

“Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once.”

“We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.”

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

“It seems to be the special peculiarity of human beings that they reflect: they think about thinking and know that they know. This, like other feedback systems, may lead to vicious circles and confusions if improperly managed, but self-awareness makes human experience resonant. It imparts that simultaneous "echo" to all that we think and feel as the box of a violin reverberates with the sound of the strings. It gives depth and volume to what would otherwise be shallow and flat.”

“Everyone is the fabric and structure of existence.”

“How did you know you're alive, unless you'd once been dead?”

“The police have enough work to keep them busy regulating automobile traffic, preventing robberies and crimes of violence and helping lost children and little old ladies find their way home. As long as the police confine themselves to such activities they are respected friends of the public. But as soon as they begin inquiring into people's private morals, they become nothing more than armed clergymen.”

“If you belong to an in-group of good, or saved, or elite people, you can only know that you’re in because someone else is out. You cannot live on the right side of the tracks without there being a wrong side of the tracks, so you ought to be grateful to the outside for having the privilege of being on the inside.”

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

“A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.”

“The sound of the rain needs no translation.”

“Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree.”

“You have seen that the universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game, and that there is no separate "you" to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. The only real "you" is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For "you" is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new.”

“What is the next step, the practical application? —I will answer that the absolutely vital thing is to consolidate your understanding, to become capable of enjoyment, of living in the present, and of the discipline which this involves. Without this you have nothing to give.”

“We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.”

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

“Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.”

“It is also in despair of being able to understand or make any productive contribution to the highly organised chaos of our politico-economic system that large numbers of people simply abandon political and social committments. They just let society be taken over by a pattern of organisation which is as self-proliferative as a weed, and whose ends and values are neither human nor instinctive but mechanical.”

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