Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Alan Watts (British-American Philosopher)

Alan Wilson Watts (1915–73) was a writer-philosopher, comparative religionist, and theologian who earned a reputation as the leading interpreter of Eastern philosophy, particularly Zen, in the West. Famous during the 1960s’ counter-culture, his writings were particularly popular among the so-called “beat generation” of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Born in Chislehurst, England, Watts read works by Eastern and Western philosophers in his teens. He came to the United States in 1939 and studied Zen under the New York Zen master Sokei-an Sasaki. Watts received a Master of Sacred Theology degree and served as an Episcopal priest 1944–50 at Northwestern University. He then left the church.

Resuscitating his former interest in Eastern thought, Watts taught comparative philosophy and psychology at the new American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. Although he had no academic background in Eastern religions and no knowledge of oriental languages, he became more widely known as a lecturer on Oriental philosophy and an experimenter with mind-altering drugs.

Watts’s elegant writings caught the popular imagination and enjoyed substantial success. His most well-known books include The Meaning of Happiness (1940,) The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for the Age of Anxiety (1950,) The Way of Zen (1957,) Psychotherapy East and West (1961,) Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen (1967,) and Beyond Theology (1973.) He argued that people in the West are in a state of confusion, seeking solace in satisfying their egos. The solution, he suggested, is to abandon the egocentric hedonism of Western culture and realize that everything is interrelated as necessary components of one “process.”

Watt’s autobiography is In My Own Way (1973.)

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Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
Alan Watts
Topics: Meditation

Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery—the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets—is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.
Alan Watts
Topics: Philosophy

If we live, we live; if we die, we die; if we suffer, we suffer; if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it.
Alan Watts
Topics: Problems, Simplicity, Simple Living

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

To remain caught up in ideas and words about Zen is, as the old masters say, to stink of Zen.
Alan Watts
Topics: Zen

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
Alan Watts
Topics: Identity, Self-Discovery

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

The life of Zen begins, therefore, in a disillusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really exist the good without the bad, the gratification of a self which is no more than an idea, and the morrow which never comes.
Alan Watts
Topics: Zen

I owe my solitude to other people.
Alan Watts
Topics: Solitude

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
Topics: Humankind, Humanity

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
Topics: Truth, Right

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
Alan Watts
Topics: Spirituality, Thinking, Zen

This—the immediate, everyday, and present experience—is it, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.
Alan Watts
Topics: The Present

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

In Zen, poverty is voluntary, and considered not really as poverty so much as simplicity, freedom, unclutteredness.
Alan Watts
Topics: Zen

At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but do not seem to make a “problem” of it.
Alan Watts
Topics: Simplicity, Simple Living

Wonder is not a disease. Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.
Alan Watts
Topics: Wonder

The hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests.
Alan Watts
Topics: Ego

The mind’s the standard of the man.
Alan Watts
Topics: Mind

I have realized that the past and the future are real illusions, that they exist only in the present, which is what there is and all that there is.
Alan Watts
Topics: Illusion, Live-now, Spirit, Spirituality, The Present, Past and Present

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.
Alan Watts
Topics: Meditation, Audiences

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.
Alan Watts
Topics: Attention

Buddha’s doctrine: man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent… this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering.
Alan Watts
Topics: Acceptance

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

We could say that meditation doesn’t have a reason or doesn’t have a purpose. In this respect it’s unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing. When we make music we don’t do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we lay music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
Alan Watts
Topics: Bravery, Meditation, Dreams, Courage

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

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

Wars based on principle are far more destructive…the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.
Alan Watts
Topics: War

We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.
Alan Watts
Topics: Self Respect

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