“If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: Universe, Life, Meaning, Nihilism, The Meaning Of Life
“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, amazon.comTagged: Life, Life's Meaning, Existentialism, Living, Being Alive
“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: Patience, Life, Problems, Let It Be, Problem Solving Quotes
“The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually ‘grasp’ reality.”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: Science, Religion, Reality, Perception
“God is unknown to those who know him, and is known to those who do not know him at all.”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: Religion, God, Spirituality
“You cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in…”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: Life, Mystery, Let It Be, Letting Go
“No work or 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, amazon.comTagged: Guilt, Fear, Love, Authenticity, Being Present
“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 sym…”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: Reality, Symbolism, meditation, Truth, Perception
“Your body does not eliminate poisons by knowing their names. To try to control fear or depression or boredom by calling them names is to resort to superstition of trust in curses and invocations.”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: Fear, Depression, Boredom, Labels
“The menu is not the meal.”— Alan Watts, twitter.comTagged: Life, Choice, Exploration, Making Decisions
“It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beg…”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: Life, The Universe, Big Bang, Identity, Individuality
“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.”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: Reality, Symbolism, meditation, Truth, Perception
“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last br…”— Alan Watts, twitter.comTagged: Writing, Being A Writer, Writers, Advice
“Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: Life, Meaning, Being Busy, Goals, Hurrying
“This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain. By remembering the past we can plan for the future. But the ability to plan for the future is offset by the "ability" to dr…”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: Emotion, Pain, Pleasure, The future, The Past
“If you know what you want, and will be content with it, you can be trusted. But if you do not know, your desires are limitless and no one can tell how to deal with you. Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: Identity, Joy, Happiness, Trust, Distrust
“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, amazon.comTagged: Sanity, Insanity, Logic, Emotion, Life
“Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: Consciousness, The Self, Identity, Navel-Gazing, Self-Analysis
“What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: Security, Insecurity, Society, Life
“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, amazon.comTagged: Intellect, Faith, Religion, Belief, The Unknown
“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.”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: Insecurity, Security, Society
“If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: Belief, God, Religion, Faith, Spirituality
“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…”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: Thought, Anxiety, Pain, Suffering, Running Away
“And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: Meaning, Life, purpose, Fate
“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, amazon.comTagged: Power, Control, People, manipulation
“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: Questions, Problems, Being Stuck, Answers, Life
“Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: Intelligence, Personality, Identity, Self-Perception
“The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”— Alan Watts, books.google.comTagged: Life, Permanence, Change, Living
“We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we're in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back form the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see its like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the pa…”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: The Past, The Present, forgiveness, Change, Meaning
“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, but which were given to us by our society.”— Alan Watts, amazon.comTagged: emotions, Unity, Universality, Spirituality, Society