Alan Watts was a British philosopher, writer, and teacher credited with bringing Eastern philosophy to a wide audience in the West; philosophy that included Buddhism, Taosim, and Hinduism.
Writing over 25 books and articles on the subject of religion and philosophy, Watts believed that philosophy, such as Buddhism, could be used as psychotherapy.
The following are some of my favourite quotes from Alan Watts.
Alan Watts Quotes:
“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.” ― Alan Watts
“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.” ― 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
“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
“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
“When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was.” – 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
“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” – Alan Watts
“A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.” ― Alan Watts
“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
“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
“Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.” – Alan Watts
“The only Zen you’ll find on mountain tops is the Zen you bring up there with you.” – Alan Watts
“What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.” – 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
“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.” – Alan Watts
“One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.” – 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 things you don’t like doing, which is stupid.” – 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
“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
“Philosophy is man’s expression of curiosity about everything and his attempt to make sense of the world primarily through his intellect.” – Alan Watts
“Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.” – Alan Watts
“If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.” – Alan Watts
“What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money … but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth … In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are “coins” for real things.” – Alan Watts
“Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social environment.” – Alan Watts
“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 beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlicue, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you’re a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don’t feel that we’re still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually–if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning– you’re not something that’s a result of the big bang. You’re not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as–Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so–I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I’m that, too. But we’ve learned to define ourselves as separate from it. ” – Alan Watts
