Alan W. Watts Quotes

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.

The menu is not the meal.

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

In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.

If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid.

Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.

The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.

The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.

Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated

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

You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.

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.

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.

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.

I have always thought that all philosophical debates are ultimately between the partisans of structure and the partisans of "goo.

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

Every 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.

It is interesting that Hindus, when they speak of the creation of the universe do not call it the work of God, they call it the play of God, the Vishnu lila, lila meaning play. And they look upon the whole manifestation of all the universes as a play, as a sport, as a kind of dance - lila perhaps being somewhat related to our word lilt