Alan Watts quotes

Born
6 January 1915 Chislehurst, Kent, England.

Died
16 November 1973.

Occupation
Philosopher, writer, speaker.

Alan Wilson Watts was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.
– Alan Watts

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

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

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

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

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
– Alan Watts

Faith is a state of openness or trust.
– 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.
– Alan Watts