Top 40 Alan W. Watts Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.”

— Alan W. Watts

2. “We suffer from the delusion that the entire universe is held in order by the categories of human thought, fearing that if we do not hold to them with the utmost tenacity, everything will vanish into chaos.”

— Alan W. Watts

3. “There is no greater freedom than the freedom to be what you are now.”

— Alan W. Watts

4. “However, until there is silence of the mind, it is almost impossible to understand eternal life, that is to say, eternal now.”

— Alan W. Watts

6. “At such times we are so aware of the moment that no attempt is made to compare its experience with other experiences.”

— Alan W. Watts

7. “You want to escape from pain, but the more you struggle to escape, the more you inflame the agony. You are afraid and want to be brave, but the effort to be brave is fear trying to run away from itself.”

— Alan W. Watts

8. “Void, not because there’s nothing there, but because our mind has no idea of it.”

— Alan W. Watts

9. “The Tao that can be Tao-ed is not the Tao.”

— Alan W. Watts

10. “There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point.”

— Alan W. Watts

11. “As a matter of fact, our age is no more insecure than any other. Poverty, disease, war, change, and death are nothing new. In the best of times “security” has never been more than temporary and apparent. But it has been possible to make the insecurity of human life supportable by belief in unchanging things beyond the reach of calamity – in God, in man’s immortal soul, and in the government of the universe by eternal laws of right.”

— Alan W. Watts

12. “There is, then, the feeling that we live in a time of unusual insecurity. In the past hundred years so many long-established traditions have broken down – traditions of family and social life, of government, of the economic order, and of religious belief. As the years go by, there seem to be fewer and fewer rocks to which we can hold, fewer things which we can regard as absolutely right and true, and fixed for all time.”

— Alan W. Watts

13. “There emerges, then, a view of life which sees its worth and point not as a struggle for constant ascent but as a dance. Virtue and harmony consist, not in accentuating the positive, but in maintaining a dynamic balance.”

— Alan W. Watts

14. “If we must be nationalists and have a sovereign state, we cannot also expect to have world peace. If we want to get everything at the lowest possible cost, we cannot expect to get the best possible quality, the balance between the two being mediocrity. If we make it an ideal to be morally superior, we cannot at the same time avoid self-righteousness. If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.”

— Alan W. Watts

15. “What we know by memory, we know only at secondhand.”

— Alan W. Watts

16. “If it is true that “when the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way,” it is often also true that when the right man uses the wrong means, the wrong means work in the right way.”

— Alan W. Watts

17. “To run away is the only defense of something rigid against an overwhelming force. Therefore the good shock absorber has not only “give,” but also stability or “weight.”

— Alan W. Watts

18. “At each moment the mystic accepts the whole of his experience, including himself as he is, his circumstances as they are, and the relationship between them as it is. Wholeness is his keyword; his acceptance is total, and he excludes no part of his experience, however unsavory it may be.”

— Alan W. Watts

19. “However, when you say to yourself, “I must go on living,” you put yourself in a double bind because you submit to a process which is essentially spontaneous and then insist it must happen.”

— Alan W. Watts

20. “Tools such as these, as well as the tools of language and thought, are of real use to men only if they are awake – not lost in the dreamland of past and future, but in the closest touch with that point of experience where reality can alone be discovered: this moment.”

— Alan W. Watts

21. “In solving problems, technology creates new problems, and we seem, as in Through the Looking-Glass, to have to keep running faster and faster to stay where we are. The question is then whether technical progress actually “gets anywhere” in the sense of increasing the delight and happiness of life.”

— Alan W. Watts

22. “Almost more common is the sensitive boy who learns in school to encrust himself for life in the shell of the “tough-guy” attitude. As an adult he plays, in self-defense, the role of the Philistine, to whom all intellectual and emotional culture is womanish and “sissy.” Carried to its final extreme, the logical end of this type of reaction to life is suicide. The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead.”

— Alan W. Watts

23. “We do not easily grasp the point that the void is creative, and that being comes from nonbeing as sound from silence and light from space.”

— Alan W. Watts

24. “The frightened or lonely person begins at once to think, “I’m afraid,” or, “I’m lonely.” This is, of course, an attempt to avoid the experience. We don’t want to be aware of this present. But as we cannot get out of the present, our only escape is into memories. Here we feel on safe ground, for the past is the fixed and the known – but also, of course, the dead.”

— Alan W. Watts

25. “Eyes and light arise mutually in the same way as yin and yang. The universe is not, therefore, composed of independent things, that is: as human thought ordinarily fragments it: but the universe disposes itself as things. It is one body, one field, whose parts give rise to each other as inseparably as fronts and backs, but in an endlessly complex and interconnected maze.”

— Alan W. Watts

26. “Unaccepted, the universe has no meaning; it is senseless fate and chaos, but acceptance is a way of discovering meaning, not of manufacturing it.”

— Alan W. Watts

27. “This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.”

— Alan W. Watts

28. “Sorrow can only be compared with the memory of joy, which is not at all the same thing as joy itself. Like words, memories never really succeed in “catching” reality.”

— Alan W. Watts

29. “Life is not a matter of life or death; it is a matter of life and death, and ultimately there is nothing to be dreaded. There is nothing outside the universe, against which it can crash.”

— Alan W. Watts

30. “Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, open-ness – an act of trust in the unknown.”

— Alan W. Watts

31. “It must be obvious, from the start, that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. But the contradiction lies a little deeper than the mere conflict between the desire for security and the fact of change. If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure.”

— Alan W. Watts

32. “I am sure, however, that the body dies because it wants to. It finds it beyond its power to resist the disease or to mend the injury, and so, tired out with the struggle, turns to death.”

— Alan W. Watts

33. “For while scientist and logician dissect and analyze, the mystic looks for meaning in the whole.”

— Alan W. Watts

34. “Faith is, above all, openness – an act of trust in the unknown.”

— Alan W. Watts

35. “Understanding comes through awareness. Can we, then, approach our experience – our sensations, feelings, and thoughts – quite simply, as if we had never known them before, and, without prejudice, look at what’s going on?”

— Alan W. Watts

36. “Tao and Nirvana are only names for an experience; those who invented them had the experience first and gave it its name afterward, but now people are so busy learning about the names that they forget the experience.”

— Alan W. Watts

37. “For God is the wholeness of life, which includes every possible aspect of man and is known in accepting the whole of our experience at each moment.”

— Alan W. Watts

38. “There is another story of a Chinese sage who was asked, “How shall we escape the heat?” – meaning, of course, the heat of suffering. He answered, “Go right into the middle of the fire.” “But how, then, shall we escape the scorching flame?” “No further pain will trouble you!” We do not need to go as far as China. The same idea comes in The Divine Comedy, where Dante and Virgin find that the way out of Hell lies at its very center.”

— Alan W. Watts

39. “If there was a big bang at the beginning of time, you are not something that is the result of that explosion at the end of the process. You are the process.”

— Alan W. Watts

40. “Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.”

— Alan W. Watts

41. “We see God every time we open our eyes; we inhale Him at every breath; we use His strength in every movement of our finger; we think Him in every thought, although we may not think of Him, and we taste Him in every bite of food.”

— Alan W. Watts

42. “The faster things move in circles, the sooner they become indistinguishable blurs. It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about “I.”

— Alan W. Watts

43. “To put it in another way, at each moment we are what we experience, and there is no real possibility of being other than what we are. Wisdom therefore consists in accepting what we are, rather than in struggling fruitlessly to be something else, as if it were possible to run away from one’s own feet.”

— Alan W. Watts

44. “If we are to have intense pleasures, we must also be liable to intense pains. The pleasure we love, and the pain we hate, but it seems impossible to have the former without the latter. Indeed, it looks as if the two must in some way alternate, for continuous pleasure is a stimulus that must either pall or be increased. And the increase will either harden the sense buds with its friction, or turn into pain. A consistent diet of rich food either destroys the appetite or makes one sick.”

— Alan W. Watts