“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
― Alan W. Watts (1915-1973)
“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
― Alan W. Watts (1915-1973)
“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 W. Watts (1915-1973)
“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”
― Alan W. Watts (1915-1973)
“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
― Alan W. Watts (1915-1973)
“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”
― Alan W. Watts (1915-1973)
“The menu is not the meal.”
― Alan W. Watts (1915-1973)
“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 W. Watts (1915-1973)
“The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”
― Alan W. Watts (1915-1973)
“A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.”
― Alan W. Watts (1915-1973)
“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”
― Alan W. Watts (1915-1973)
“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 W. Watts (1915-1973)
“If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.”
― Alan W. Watts (1915-1973)
“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 W. Watts (1915-1973)
“Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home.”
― Alan W. Watts (1915-1973)
“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 W. Watts (1915-1973)
“Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.”
― Alan W. Watts (1915-1973)
“Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.”
― Alan W. Watts (1915-1973)