Eastern Philosophies, Translated | 99 Alan Watts Quotes
Alan Watts brought Eastern wisdom and teachings to the West. Through his books and public speaking, Watts served as an ambassador of Eastern philosophy. Watts’ journey began early in life. He was born in 1915 near London and fell in love with a nearby Buddhist Lodge. Fascinated by Buddhist philosophy, Watts started a lifelong study of spirituality. Watts later moved to the United States, where he became an Episcopal priest. Watts then moved to Millbrook, New York, where he wrote his most famous book, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety. Eventually, Watts moved to San Francisco, where he taught Buddhist studies and even hosted a radio show called “Way Beyond the West.” The radio show was picked up for national syndication, as Watts connected with American listeners. People were curious about Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism, and Watts’ words struck a chord. Over the years, Alan Watts became a fixture in the counterculture movement. He continued to travel, speak, and teach until he died in 1973.
While the teachings of Alan Watts are derived from now well-known Eastern philosophies, his words were unique. Alan Watts was gifted with the talent to translate deeply philosophical texts into layman’s terms. Readers today still find resonance and connection to Watts’ words. The remarkable life of Alan Watts sets him apart as a man worth studying and his quotes will live on well into the future.
Table of Contents
- Short Alan Watts Quotes
- Alan Watts Best Quotes
- Inspirational Alan Watts Quotes on Life
- Positive Alan Watts Quotes on Love
- Alan Watts Quotes On Images
Short Alan Watts Quotes
- Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction. Alan Watts
- You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here. Alan Watts
- A scholar tries to learn something every day; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily. Alan Watts
- The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced. Alan Watts
- Society is our extended mind and body. Alan Watts
- The frightened mind that runs away from everyday terrors meets the seeking mind that wants a better world. Alan Watts
- Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences. Alan Watts
- As long as you do not know how to die and come to life again, you are but a sorry traveler on this dark earth. Alan Watts
- For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere. Alan Watts
- Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. Alan Watts
- Only doubtful truths need defense. Alan Watts
- Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree. Alan Watts
- You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself. Alan Watts
- I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware. Alan Watts
- Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content. Alan Watts
- The most powerful thing that can be done: surrender. See. And love is an act of surrender to another person. Alan Watts
- The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion. Alan Watts
- To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead, for as our own proverb says, “to travel well is better than to arrive”. Alan Watts
- The menu is not the meal. Alan Watts
- When you die, you don’t have to deal with everlasting nonexistence because that’s not an experience. Alan Watts
- When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of … Nothing is left but to love. Alan Watts
- There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know. Alan Watts
- 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. Alan Watts
- There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can’t be said. Alan Watts
- Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way. Alan Watts
- 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
- Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun. Alan Watts
- The source of all light is in the eye. Alan Watts
- Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe. Alan Watts
- The ego-self constantly pushes reality away. It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories. Alan Watts
- The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless. Alan Watts
- The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from the giant pine, which lives for a thousand years. Alan Watts
- You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago. Alan Watts
- Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself. Alan Watts
- 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. Alan Watts
- Peace can be made only by those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love. Alan Watts
- 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. Alan Watts
- You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes. Alan Watts
- You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meanings of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales. Alan Watts
- Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything. Alan Watts
- 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
- I owe my solitude to other people. Alan Watts
- Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone. Alan Watts
- Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them. Alan Watts
- So then, 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
- If we are open only to discoveries which will accord with what we know already, we may as well stay shut. Alan Watts
- If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go. Alan Watts
- If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world. Alan Watts
- In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself. Alan Watts
- It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description. Alan Watts
- Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior. Alan Watts
- Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency. Alan Watts
- You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean. Alan Watts
- Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together. Alan Watts
- Eternal life is realized when the last trace of difference between “I” and “now” has vanished – when there is just this “now” and nothing else. Alan Watts
- 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
- What religion calls the vision of God is found in giving up any belief in the idea of God. Alan Watts
- God is unknown to those who know him and is known to those who do not know him at all. Alan Watts
Alan Watts Best Quotes
- How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god? Alan Watts
- But when you know for sure that your separate ego is a fiction, you actually feel yourself as the whole process and pattern of life. Experience and experiencer become one experiencing, known and knower one knowing. Alan Watts
- A world which increasingly consists of destinations without journeys between them, a world which values only “getting somewhere” as fast as possible, becomes a world without substance. Alan Watts
- Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive un-faith 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
- 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
- But 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 the bucket the water does not run. To ‘have’ running water you must let go of it and let it run. Alan Watts
- To look at life without words is not to lose the ability to form words- to think, remember, and plan. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam. Alan Watts
- 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. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. Alan Watts
- Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence. Alan Watts
- Οur 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
- A particularly significant example of brain against body, or measures against matter, is urban man’s total slavery to clocks … Our slavery to these mechanical drill masters has gone so far and our whole culture is so involved with it that reform is a forlorn hope; without them civilization would collapse entirely. A less brainy culture would learn to synchronize its body rhythms rather than its clocks. Alan Watts
- If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death. Alan Watts
- Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—-to the conquest of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature. Alan Watts
- There is only this now. It does not come from anywhere; it is not going anywhere. It is not permanent, but it is not impermanent. Though moving, it is always still. When we try to catch it, it seems to run away, and yet it is always here and there is no escape from it. And when we turn around to find the self which knows this moment, we find that it has vanished like the past. Alan Watts
- As you make more and more powerful microscopic instruments, the universe has to get smaller and smaller in order to escape the investigation. Just as when the telescopes become more and more powerful, the galaxies have to recede in order to get away from the telescopes. Because what is happening in all these investigations is this: Through us and through our eyes and senses, the universe is looking at itself. And when you try to turn around to see your own head, what happens? It runs away. You can’t get at it. This is the principle. Shankara explains it beautifully in his commentary on the Kenopanishad where he says ‘That which is the Knower, the ground of all knowledge, is never itself an object of knowledge.’ Alan Watts
- Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body, he ‘has’ a body. Instead of living and loving he ‘has’ instincts for survival and copulation. Alan Watts
- 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
- I have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort. Sometimes I call it the backwards law. When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float. When you hold your breath, you lose it—which immediately calls to mind an ancient and much neglected saying, whosoever would save his soul shall lose it. Alan Watts
Inspirational Alan Watts Quotes on 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
- Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal. For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it persists forever. Alan Watts
- 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. Alan Watts
- 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
- If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you’ll spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don’t like doing, which is stupid. Alan Watts
- Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present. Alan Watts
- We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. 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
- You see, for all life is an act of faith and an act of gamble. The moment you take a step, you do so on an act of faith because you don’t really know that the floor’s not going to give under your feet. The moment you take a journey, what an act of faith. The moment that you enter into any kind of human undertaking in relationship, what an act of faith. Alan Watts
- The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security. Alan Watts
- In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it’s all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean. Alan Watts
- No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them. Alan Watts
- To live, and to love, you have to take risks. There will be disappointments and failures and disasters as a result of taking these risks. But in the long run it will work out. Alan Watts
- 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. Alan Watts
- We do not dance to reach a certain point on the floor, but simply to dance. Energy itself, as William Blake said, is eternal delight—and all life is to be lived in the spirit of rapt absorption in an arabesque of rhythms. Alan Watts
- But nirvana is a radical transformation of how it feels to be alive … not as an encounter between subject and object, but as a polarized field where the contest of opposites has become the play of opposites. Alan Watts
Positive Alan Watts Quotes on Love
- No work of 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
- We have, as a result of two thousand years of repression, sex on the brain. It’s not always the right place for it. Alan Watts
- The consequences of fake love are almost invariably destructive, because they build up resentment on the part of the person who does the fake loving, as well as on the part of those who are its recipients. Alan Watts
- The essential point is to consider love as a spectrum. There is not, as it were just nice love and nasty love, spiritual love and material love, mature affection on the one hand and infatuation on the other. These are all forms of the same energy. And you have to take it and let it grow where you find it. Alan Watts
Alan Watts Quotes On Images
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