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Home: Alan Watts Quotes

Alan Watts Quotes

Philosopher, Writer & Speaker
Born On
1915-01-06
Died On
1973-11-16
Birth Place
Chislehurst, Kent, England
Death Place
Mt. Tamalpais, California, USA
Birth Sign
capricorn
Spouse
Dorothy DeWitt, Eleanor Everett, Mary Jane
Nationality
British
Education
Seabury-Western Theological Seminary
Writers, Philosophers, Intellectuals & Academics
A few confused students asked this wise man what they were supposed to do after graduating from college and gave him a hint that they were clueless about the future. On hearing this, the teacher asked these students what they would actually love to do if money wasn't a priority. Some of the answers were conventional like 'I want to program' or 'I want to treat the ill'. A few others wanted to pursue a creative line of work such as becoming a painter or a writer. The teacher was even surprised by some out of the box answers such as "I'd like to live an out-of-doors life and ride horses." Their career choices were different but they all agreed that one cannot make money by painting, writing or riding horses. Listening to this the teacher walked up to the students and looked at each one of them in the eye and said, 'You do just that.' Then turning to the one who loved horse riding, he said, "You do that and forget the money, because, if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will 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. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way. And after all, if you do really like what you're doing, it doesn't matter what it is, you can eventually turn it - you could eventually become a master of it. It's the only way to become a master of something, to be really with it. And then you'll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don't worry too much." Want to know who the teacher is? It was none other than the great philosopher Alan Watts. Explore this section to find more of such uplifting and inspiring quotes by this eminent proponent of Zen Buddhism.

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.

Trust Faith
Alan Watts

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

Inspiration
Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

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

Love
Alan Watts

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

Change
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.

Past Present Future
Alan Watts

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

Universe
Alan Watts

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

Future
Alan Watts

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

Pain Pleasure
Alan Watts

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

Attitude Truth Faith
Alan Watts

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.

Love Work Future Heart
Alan Watts

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

World Picture
Alan Watts

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.

Relationship
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

Saints need sinners.

Saint
Alan Watts

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.

Principles Parents
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.

Night Stars Universe
Alan Watts

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

Nothing Ego Focus
Alan Watts

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.

Experience Eyes
Alan Watts

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

People Technology Universe
Alan Watts

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.

Greatness Money People Imagination
Alan Watts

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.

People Devil
Alan Watts

The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.

People
Alan Watts

Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it's just doing it.

Alan Watts

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

Thinking
Alan Watts

And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.

Attitude Belief Faith
Alan Watts

I owe my solitude to other people.

People Solitude
Alan Watts

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

Reality
Alan Watts

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.

Synchronization
Alan Watts

Faith is a state of openness or trust.

State Trust Faith
Alan Watts

But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.

Nothing Power
Alan Watts

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

Alan Watts

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

World
Alan Watts

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.

Sermon
Alan Watts

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

Present Reason
Alan Watts

Unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax.

Present Future
Alan Watts

Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.

Law
Alan Watts

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

Greatness
Alan Watts

Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.

Alan Watts

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.

Duty
Alan Watts

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

Style Universe
Alan Watts

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.

America People Universe History
Alan Watts

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens.

Culture Universe
Alan Watts

And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment.

Surroundings
Alan Watts

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.

Nature Faith
Alan Watts

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

Things
Alan Watts

The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.

World
Alan Watts

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

Life
Alan Watts

We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

Experience
Alan Watts

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