Alan Wilson Watts Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence which does not work according to plan, according to a one-at-a-time order of thought. Yet the concrete evidence of such an intelligence is right to hand in our own thoughtlessly ordered bodies. For the Tao does not 'know' how it produces the universe just as we do not 'know' how we construct our brains. The Way of Zen

2. I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

3. In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean. The Essential Alan Watts

4. Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together. The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

5. Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

6. Philosophers, for example, often fail to recognize that their remarks about the universe apply also to themselves and their remarks. If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so.

7. Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way. The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

8. The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

9. 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.

10. Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge construction, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise so long as their progress is considered piecemeal, endlessly having the distance between them. However, as it is not Achilles but the method of measurement which fails to catch up with the tortoise, so it is not man but his method of thought which fails to find fulfillment in experience. Nature, Man and Woman

11. We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.

12. What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins" for real things. The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

13. when somebody plays music, you listen. you just follow those sounds, and eventually you understand the music. the point can't be explained in words because music is not words, but after listening for a while, you understand the point of it, and that point is the music itself. in exactly the same way, you can listen to all experiences. Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation

14. You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up. The Essential Alan Watts