
#Alan watts quotes full
It’s better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing, than a long life spent in a miserable way. It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description. Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content. Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick. Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience.

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe. The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself – so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed. Alan Watts Quotes The only way to make sense of change is to plunge in and join the dance WONDER & PLAY 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. Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences. What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it. The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.
#Alan watts quotes free
One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt. When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us. Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way. The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle. You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.Įvery intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.Ī scholar tries to learn something everyday a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily. Here are the best Alan Watts quotes on life, spirituality, and the Universe. He moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York, where he was born in Chislehurst, England.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone. Alan Wilson Watts was an English philosopher, writer, and speaker who popularized and translated Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy from India and China for a Western audience. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged. This is the real secret of life - to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the Gods made for fun. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own.
