Quotes by Alan Watts

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

— Alan Watts

Wisdom

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.

— Alan Watts

Wisdom

Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

— Alan Watts

Wisdom

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

Love

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

Hope

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

Wisdom

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.

— Alan Watts

Happiness

But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.

— Alan Watts

Wisdom

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

— Alan Watts

Wisdom

In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.

— Alan Watts

Wisdom

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

— Alan Watts

Wisdom

You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.

— Alan Watts

Wisdom

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

— Alan Watts

Wisdom

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

— Alan Watts

Wisdom

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

— Alan Watts

Love

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

Wisdom

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

— Alan Watts

Wisdom

The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.

— Alan Watts

Wisdom

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

— Alan Watts

Wisdom

But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.

— Alan Watts

Truth

So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.

— Alan Watts

Wisdom

Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

— Alan Watts

Wisdom

In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.

— Alan Watts

Wisdom

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

— Alan Watts

Hope