Alan Watts was a well known British writer, philosopher and speaker who was best known as a populariser and an interpreter of Eastern philosophy for the Western audience. He was born on 6th January 1915 in England and moved to United States in 1938 where he began Zen training in New York. While pursuing a career he received a master’s degree in theology from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. He become an episcopal priest in 1945 but left the ministry within 5 years and joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies in California. Watts has written more than 25 books and numerous articles on subject pertaining to Eastern and Western religion.
According to critic Erik Davis, his “writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity.”
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
– Alan Watts
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
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
– 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
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
Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
– Alan Watts
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
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
– Alan Watts
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
– Alan Watts
The menu is not the meal.
– 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
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
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
– 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
The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.
– 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
Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up… now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.
– Alan Watts
Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
– Alan Watts
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
A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
– Alan Watts
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
– Alan Watts
Hope you enjoyed this collection of Alan Watts quotes.
