Alan Watts > Quotes

“A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So, he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions.”
― Alan Watts

“You yourself are the eternal energy which appears as this universe. You didn't come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.”
― Alan Watts

“Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.”
― Alan Watts

“The past and the future, are in the present”
― Alan Watts

“The biggest ego trip is getting rid of your ego, and of course the joke of it all is that your ego does not exist.”
― Alan Watts

“When you die, you're not going to have to put up with everlasting non-existance, because that's not an experience. A lot of people are afraid that when they die, they're going to be locked up in a dark room forever, - Try and imagine what it would be like to go to sleep and never wake up. And if you think long enough about that...it will pose the next question. What was it like to wake up after never having gone to sleep? That was when you were born...you see...you...you can't have an experience of nothing so after you're dead the only thing that can happen is the same experience or the same sort of experience as when you were born.”
― Alan Watts

“Regard yourself as a cloud, in the flesh, because you see, clouds never make mistakes. Did you ever see a cloud that was misshapen? Did you ever see a badly designed wave? No, they always do the right thing. But, if you will, treat yourself for a while as a cloud or a wave and realize that you can’t make a mistake whatever you do. Because even if you do something that appears totally disastrous, it will all come out in the wash somehow or another. Then through this capacity you will develop a kind of confidence. And through confidence you will be able to trust your own intuition.”
― Alan Watts

“No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.”
― Alan Watts

“Birdle Burble


I went out of mind and then came to my senses

By meeting a magpie who mixed up his tenses,

Who muddled distinctions of nouns and of verbs,

And insisted that logic is bad for the birds.

With a poo-wee cluck and a chit, chit-chit;

The grammar and meaning don't matter a bit.



The stars in their courses have no destination;

The train of events will arrive at no station;

The inmost and ultimate Self of us all

Is dancing on nothing and having a ball.

So with a chat for chit and with tat for tit,

This will be that, and that will be It!

(poem for James Broughton)”
― Alan Watts

“If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so… The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.”
― Alan Watts

“Waking up to who you are requires letting go of you imagine yourself to be.”
― Alan Watts

“Existence is basically a kind of dancing or music--an immensely complex energy pattern which needs no explanation other than itself--just as wee do not ask what is the meaning of fugues by Bach or sonatas by Mozart. We do not dance to reach a certain point on the floor, but simply to dance. Energy itself, as William Blake said, is eternal delight--and all life is to be lived in the spirit of rapt absorption in an arabesque of rhythms.”
― Alan Watts

“Intellectualisation creates a gap or lack of rapport between you and your life. You may think about things so much that you get into the state where you are eating the menu instead of the dinner.”
― Alan Watts

“The meaning of happiness consists in three elements — freedom, gratitude, and the sense of wonder.”
― Alan Watts

“To live, and to love, you have to take risks. There will be disappointments and failures and disasters as a result of taking these risks. But in the long run it will work out.”
― Alan Watts

“You can’t bite your own teeth. You can’t taste your own tongue. And you can’t touch the tip of [your] finger with the tip [of the same] finger. And that is why there is always an element of profound mystery in the problem of who we are”
― Alan Watts

“You are under no obligation to be the person you were five minutes ago.”
― Alan Watts

“The past is the result of the present”
― Alan Watts

“We do not "come into" this world, we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves", as the universe "peoples". Every individual is an expression of the realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.”
― Alan Watts

“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 Watts

“You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it.”
― Alan Watts

“The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.”
― Alan Watts

“The reason you don't know what you want is because you already have it.”
― Alan Watts

“Waking up to who you are requires letting go who you imagine yourself being.”
― Alan Watts

“Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up.”
― Alan Watts

“Music differs from, say, travel. When you travel, you are trying to get somewhere. In music, though, one doesn’t make the end of the composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest. And there would be composers who only wrote finales. People would go to a concert just to hear one crackling chord… because that’s the end!”
― Alan Watts

“A great occasion is somehow spoiled for is unless photographed and to read about it the next day in the newspaper is oddly more fun for us than the original event this is a disaster.”
― Alan Watts

“It is in vain that we can predict and control the course of events in the future, unless we know how to live in the present. It is in vain that doctors prolong life if we spend the extra time being anxious to live still longer.”
― Alan Watts

“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
― Alan Watts

“The essential point is to consider love as a spectrum. There is not, as it were, just nice love and nasty love, spiritual love and material love, mature affection on the one hand and infatuation on the other. These are all forms of the same energy. And you have to take it and let it grow where you find it. When you find only one of these forms existing, if at least you will water it, the rest will blossom as well. But the effectual prerequisite from the beginning is to let it have its way.”
― Alan Watts