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Top Alan Wilson Watts Quotes

Browse top 106 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Alan Wilson Watts.

Favorite Alan Wilson Watts Quotes

1. "Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
2. "Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive; survival -going on living- thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it; because it does not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will, to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
3. "It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
4. "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 Wilson Watts
5. "Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
6. "But the transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions. As Lao-tzu said, "The scholar gains every day, but the Taoist loses every day." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
7. "For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax.There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you willnever be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be livingfor some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit backwith full contentment and say, "Now, I've arrived!" Your entireeducation has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparingyou for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
8. "For if you know what you want, and will be content with it, you can be trusted. But if you do not know, your desires are limitless and no one can tell how to deal with you. Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
9. "Your body does not eliminate poisons by knowing their names. To try to control fear or depression or boredom by calling them names is to resort to superstition of trust in curses and invocations. It is so easy to see why this does not work. Obviously, we try to know, name, and define fear in order to make it "objective," that is, separate from "I." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
10. "What we see as death,empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of thisendlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there shouldseem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is anurgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is notime but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there isnever anything to be gained—though the zest of the game is to pretendthat there is." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
11. "This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain. By remembering the past we can plan for the future. But the ability to plan for the future is offset by the "ability" to dread pain and to fear of the unknown. Furthermore, the growth of an acute sense of the past and future gives us a corresponding dim sense of the present. In other words, we seem to reach a point where the advantages of being conscious are outweighed by its disadvantages, where extreme sensitivity makes us unadaptable." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
12. "Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
13. "I owe my solitude to other people." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
14. "Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
15. "Forthe world is an ever-elusive and ever-disappointing mirage only fromthe standpoint of someone standing aside from it—as if it were quiteother than himself—and then trying to grasp it.But a third response is possible. Not withdrawal, not stewardship onthe hypothesis of a future reward, but the fullest collaboration with theworld as a harmonious system of contained conflicts—based on therealization that the only real "I" is the whole endless process." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
16. "For we have never actually understood the revolutionary sense beneath them – the incredible truth that what religion calls the vision of God is found in giving up any belief in the idea of God." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
17. "Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge construction, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise so long as their progress is considered piecemeal, endlessly having the distance between them. However, as it is not Achilles but the method of measurement which fails to catch up with the tortoise, so it is not man but his method of thought which fails to find fulfillment in experience." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
18. "as masters of technical weapons we are fighting the environment as if we still believed ourselves to be strangers on the earth, sent down into this world from a purely abstract, ideational, and spiritual heaven." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
19. "My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern in the water." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
20. "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 Wilson Watts
21. "All too easily, we confuse the world as we symbolize it with the world as it is. As semanticist Alfred Korzybski used to say, it is an urgent necessity to distinguish between the map and the territory and, he might have added, between the flag and the country." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
22. "We have made a problem for ourselves by confusing the intelligible with the fixed. We think that making sense out of life is impossible unless the flow of events can somehow be fitted into a framework of rigid forms. To be meaningful, life must be understandable in terms of fixed ideas and laws, and these in turn must correspond to unchanging and eternal realities behind the shifting scene. But if this what "making sense out of life" means, we have set ourselves the impossible task of making fixity out of flux." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
23. "wabe." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
24. "English the differences between things and actions are clearly, if not always logically, distinguished, but a great number of Chinese words do duty for both nouns and verbs–so that one who thinks in Chinese has little difficulty in seeing that objects are also events, that our world is a collection of processes rather than entities." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
25. "There is, then, an analogy–and perhaps more than mere analogy–between central vision and conscious, one-at-a-time thinking, and between peripheral vision and the rather mysterious process which enables us to regulate the incredible complexity of our bodies without thinking at all. It should be noted, further, that we call our bodies complex as a result of trying to understand them in terms of linear thought, of words and concepts. But the complexity is not so much in our bodies as in the task of trying to understand them by this means of thinking." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
26. "To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
27. "I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
28. "For man seems to be unable to live without myth, without the belief that the routine and drudgery, the pain and fear of this life have some meaning and goal in the future. At once new myths come into being – political and economic myths with extravagant promises of the best of futures in the present world. These myths give the individual a certain sense of meaning by making him part of a vast social effort, in which he loses something of his own emptiness and loneliness. Yet the very violence of these political religions betrays the anxiety beneath them – for they are but men huddling together and shouting to give themselves courage in the dark." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
29. "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. It is the same with thinking, which is really silent talking. It is not, by itself, open to the discovery of anything new, for its only novelties are simply arrangements of old words and ideas." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
30. "If the human race develops an electronic nervous system, outside the bodies of individual people, thus giving us all one mind and one global body, this is almost precisely what has happened in the organization of cells which compose our own bodies. We have already done it. [...] If all this ends with the human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns, why should that trouble us? For that is exactly what we are now!" ~ Alan Wilson Watts
31. "Herein lies the crux of the matter. To stand face to face with insecurity is still not to understand it. To understand it, you must not face it but be it." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
32. "Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
33. "We seldomrealize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions arenot actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and imageswhich we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. Wecopy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them thatexcrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting issupposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is alsolearned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes tofunerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power justbecause we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extendedmind and body.Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is usingits whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeedseparate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game withself-contradictory rules." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
34. "The menu is not the meal." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
35. "Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
36. "The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it with the world as they think about it and talk about it and describe it. For on the one hand there is the real world and on the other there is a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds. These are very very useful symbols, all civilization depends on them, but like all good things they have their disadvantages, and the principle disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
37. "A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
38. "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 infintesimal 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. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
39. "Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they'll say you're crazy and you're blasphemous, and they'll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, ‘My goodness, I've just discovered that I'm God,' they'll laugh and say, ‘Oh, congratulations, at last you found out." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
40. "Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
41. "when somebody plays music, you listen. you just follow those sounds, and eventually you understand the music. the point can't be explained in words because music is not words, but after listening for a while, you understand the point of it, and that point is the music itself. in exactly the same way, you can listen to all experiences." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
42. "Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
43. "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 Wilson Watts
44. "We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we're in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back form the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see its like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that...Also watch the flow of music. The melody as its expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence...you wait till later to find out what the sentence means...The present is always changing the past." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
45. "The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
46. "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 Wilson Watts
47. "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 Wilson Watts
48. "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 Wilson Watts
49. "The source of all light is in the eye." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
50. "Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone." ~ Alan Wilson Watts
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I was running an assembly line designed to build memory chips. I saw the microprocessor as a bloody nuisance."
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Wit
Con
Thin
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Here
Per
Ear
Tan
Thou
Self
Ally
Ten
End
Use
King
Lit
Pen
Hen
Able
Though
Less
Ours
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Cause
Owe
Hey
Universe
Present
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Once
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Seem
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Ring
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Understand
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