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Alan Watts Quotes - Page 11

All Quotes Acceptance Anxiety Art Attitude Awakening Belief Birth Buddhism Change Chaos Consciousness Culture Curiosity Dance Dancing Darkness Death Desire Effort Ego Energy Enlightenment Environment Expectations Failing Faith Feelings Fighting Freedom Frustration Future Giving God Heart Human Nature Identity Ignorance Imagination Inspirational Inspiring Journey Joy Language Laughter Learning Leaving Letting Go Life Listening Love Lying Meditation Memories Mindfulness Moon Morning Motivational Nature Overcoming Pain Past Philosophy Pleasure Purpose Rain Reality Religion Risk Running Silence Simplicity Skins Sleep Soul Spirituality Suffering Taoism Technology Time Understanding Unity Universe Vision War Water Wisdom Worry Writing

This-the immediate, everyday, and present experience-is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.

This-the immediate, everyday, and present experience-is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.

Everyday, Existence, Ultimate

Alan Watts (1973). “This is It, and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience”, Vintage

You can't make love without art.

Art, Making Love

Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world — a place where they are one.

Practice, Breathing, Bridges

Alan Watts (2010). “What Is Zen?”, p.71, New World Library

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.

Circles, Expectations, Survival

Think about a piece of music - some great symphony - we don't expect it to get better as it develops, or that its whole purpose is to reach the final crescendo. The joy is found in listening to the music in each moment.

Thinking, Symphony, Joy

The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery. We do not realize that our so-called love and concern for the individual is simply the other face of our own fear of death or rejection. In his exaggerated valuation of separate identity, the personal ego is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting, and then getting more and more anxious about the coming crash!

Rejection, Ego, Identity

Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.56, Souvenir Press

You are something that the whole world is doing just as when the sea has waves on it.

Sea, World, Wave

Alan Watts (1999). “The Tao of Philosophy”, p.28, Tuttle Publishing

Substances like LSD, which give away a secret about the nature of the social game - the human game and what underlies it - are potentially dangerous, of course, like any good thing is. Electricity is dangerous, fire is dangerous, cars are dangerous, planes are dangerous, but not so dangerous as driving on the freeway. The only way to handle danger is to face it. If you start getting frightened of it, then you make it worse. Because you project onto it all kinds of bogeys and threats which don't exist in it at all.

Fire, Games, Giving

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

Omnipotence, Knowing, Not Knowing

Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.

Jesus, Atheist, Men

Alan W. Watts (2011). “Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal”, p.147, Vintage

Do you have any control over being conscious? Do you know how you will?

Conscious, Know How, Knows

There is no mission, nor interest to convert, and yet I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter. We should see at once that the high ideals for which we are killing and regimenting each other are empty and abstract substiutes for the unheeded miracles that surround us - not only in the obvious wonders of nature but also in the overwhelming uncanny fact of mere existence.

Laughter, Believe, Miracle

A holy person is someone who is whole; who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites.

Opposites, Spirituality, Holy

Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain; the most complicated thing in the world, which you yourself grew...without even thinking about it.

Thinking, Light, Smell

There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.

Life, Frustration, Self

"The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety". Book by Alan Watts, 1951.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

Language, Description, Hard

Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.24, Souvenir Press

The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.

Learning, Ignorance, Knowledge

Alan W Watts (2012). “Wisdom Of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety”, p.98, Random House

Courage is the goal of cowards.

Goal, Coward

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

Art, Said, Poetry Is

Everybody is I, you all know you are you. And wheresoever's beings exist throughout all galaxies it doesn't any difference. You are all of them, and when they come into being that's you coming into being, you know that very well. Only you don't have to remember the past in the same way you don't have to think about how you work your thyroid gland. You don't have to know how to shine the sun, you just do it, like you breathe. Doesn't it really astonish you that you are this fantastically complex thing, and that you're doing all of this and you never had any education on how to do it.

Past, Thinking, Differences

We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.

Art, Thinking, Ideas

The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation. The head and the feet are different, but not separate, and though man is not connected to the universe by exactly the same physical relation as branch to tree or feet to head, he is nonetheless connected - and by physical relations of fascinating complexity.

Motivational, Men, Feet

Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.56, Souvenir Press

If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.

Black, Calling, World

Alan W Watts (2012). “Wisdom Of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety”, p.76, Random House

If you can't meditate in a boiler room, you can't meditate.

Inspiration, Meditation Practice, Boiler Room

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.

Self, Two, Alcohol

Alan W. Watts, Daniel Pinchbeck (2013). “The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness”, p.76, New World Library

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