260 Alan Watts Quotes to Awaken Your Mind and Free Your Spirit

Alan Watts spent his life translating Zen, Taoism, and Eastern philosophy into language the West could actually feel. Below are 260 alan watts quotes — every line checked against his books and recorded lectures, with the source named on each one, and no invented lines. Four widely-circulating but disputed lines are kept with an honest “Attributed to Alan Watts” label so you can quote him with confidence.

Editor’s Picks

Zen Wisdom

1. Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes. — Alan Watts (The Way of Zen (1957))
2. When the question is, "Master, what is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?" Then he replies, "There is enough breeze in this fan to keep me cool." That is answering the metaphysical in terms of the everyday, and that is, more or less, the principle Zen works on. — Alan Watts (What Is Zen? (lectures))
3. If Christianity is wine and Islam coffee, Buddhism is most certainly tea. — Alan Watts (The Way of Zen (1957))
4. To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it. It is to be able to use it as an instrument instead of being used by it. — Alan Watts (The Way of Zen (1957))
5. A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily. — Alan Watts (Attributed to Alan Watts)
6. The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there. — Alan Watts (Attributed to Alan Watts)
7. Zen Buddhism is a way and a view of life which does not belong to any of the formal categories of modern Western thought. It is not religion or philosophy; it is not a psychology or a type of science. — Alan Watts (The Way of Zen (1957))
8. Chuang-tzu: "The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror; it grasps nothing; it refuses nothing; it receives, but does not keep." — Alan Watts (Become What You Are (lectures))
9. But the transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions. — Alan Watts (The Joyous Cosmology (1962))
10. But nirvana is a radical transformation of how it feels to be alive: it feels as if everything were myself, or as if everything—including "my" thoughts and actions—were happening of itself. — Alan Watts (Psychotherapy East and West (1961))
11. One's life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If one is paranoid, the other is metanoid. — Alan Watts (Psychotherapy East and West (1961))
12. The centipede was happy, quite, until a toad in fun said, "Pray, which leg goes after which?" This worked his mind to such a pitch, he lay distracted in a ditch, considering how to run. — Alan Watts (The Way of Zen (1957))
13. The psychotherapist tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to be in the world of social convention but not of the world. — Alan Watts (Psychotherapy East and West (1961))
14. The menu is not the meal. — Alan Watts (Attributed to Alan Watts)
15. If a man seeks the Buddha, that man loses the Buddha. — Alan Watts (The Way of Zen (1957))
16. It is really impossible to appreciate what is meant by the Tao without becoming, in a rather special sense, stupid. — Alan Watts (The Way of Zen (1957))
17. Buddhism … is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or "loyal opposition" to the culture in which it is involved. — Alan Watts (Psychotherapy East and West (1961))
18. The most basic Buddhist stance: sober examination of what lies before you, leaving aside all assumptions. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
19. It would seem that to be incapable of sitting and watching with the mind completely at rest is to be incapable of experiencing the world in which we live to the full. For one does not know the world simply in thinking about it and doing about it. — Alan Watts (The Way of Zen (1957))
20. I want to make one thing absolutely clear. I am not a Zen Buddhist, I am not advocating Zen Buddhism, I am not trying to convert anyone to it. I have nothing to sell. I'm an entertainer. — Alan Watts (lectures)

The Tao and the Flow of Nature

1. The world is an ever-elusive and ever-disappointing mirage only from the standpoint of someone standing aside from it—as if it were quite other than himself—and then trying to grasp it. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
2. 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. — Alan Watts (The Essential Alan Watts (lectures))
3. To Taoism that which is absolutely still or absolutely perfect is absolutely dead, for without the possibility of growth and change there can be no Tao. — Alan Watts (lectures)
4. To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end. — Alan Watts (The Way of Zen (1957))
5. Everything is change. Nothing can be held on to. And if you go with the flux, you flow with it. However, if you resist the stream, it fights you. — Alan Watts (Out of Your Mind (lectures))
6. Man aspires to govern nature, but the more one studies ecology, the more absurd it seems to speak of any one feature of an organism, or of an organism/environment field, as governing or ruling others. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
7. Whether we like it or not, change comes, and the greater the resistance, the greater the pain. Buddhism perceives the beauty of change, for life is like music in this: if any note or phrase is held for longer than its appointed time, the melody is lost. — Alan Watts (Become What You Are (lectures))
8. There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. — Alan Watts (Does It Matter? (1970))
9. The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from the giant pine, which lives for a thousand years. — Alan Watts (lectures)
10. Every one of us is marvellous and complicated and interesting and gorgeous just as we are. — Alan Watts (Out of Your Mind (lectures))
11. The art of life is more like navigation than warfare, for what is important is to understand the winds, the tides, the currents, the seasons, and the principles of growth and decay, so that one's actions may use them and not fight them. — Alan Watts (Tao: The Watercourse Way (1975))
12. Confucians, along with Hebrew, Islamic, and Catholic scholastics, as well as Protestant fundamentalists, are like tourists who study guidebooks and maps instead of wandering freely and looking at the view. — Alan Watts (Tao: The Watercourse Way (1975))
13. Trust in human nature is acceptance of the good-and-bad of it, and it is hard to trust those who do not admit their own weakness. — Alan Watts (Tao: The Watercourse Way (1975))
14. The possession of a strong will and a clever head makes some things very difficult to see. — Alan Watts (lectures)
15. Chao-Chou asked, "What is the Tao?" The master replied, "Your ordinary consciousness is the Tao." … "If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it's like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?" — Alan Watts (Tao: The Watercourse Way (1975))
16. Man when living is soft and tender; when dead he is hard and tough. … It is said: the hard and the tough are parts of death; the soft and tender are parts of life. — Alan Watts (Nature, Man and Woman (1958))
17. Lao-tzu, that master of the law of reversed effort, who declared that those who justify themselves do not convince, that to know truth one must get rid of knowledge, and that nothing is more powerful and creative than emptiness—from which men shrink. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
18. Have you really looked at a seashell? There's not an aesthetic fault in it anywhere—it's absolutely perfect. Now, do you think that shells look at each other and critique each other's appearance? Of course not, but that's what we do. — Alan Watts (Out of Your Mind (lectures))

The Self and the Ego

1. Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. — Alan Watts (Psychotherapy East and West (1961))
2. The prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
3. We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
4. When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique. — Alan Watts (Psychotherapy East and West (1961))
5. The ego-self constantly pushes reality away. It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
6. There is simply experience. There is not something or someone experiencing experience! You do not feel feelings, think thoughts, or sense sensations any more than you hear hearing, see sight, or smell smelling. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
7. But when you know for sure that your separate ego is a fiction, you actually feel yourself as the whole process and pattern of life. Experience and experiencer become one experiencing, known and knower one knowing. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
8. If the ego were to disappear, or rather, to be seen as a useful fiction, there would no longer be the duality of subject and object, experiencer and experience. — Alan Watts (Nature, Man and Woman (1958))
9. Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
10. You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean. — Alan Watts (lectures)
11. Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence. — Alan Watts (lectures)
12. What I am really saying is that you don't need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. — Alan Watts (lectures)
13. You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing. — Alan Watts (lectures)
14. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. — Alan Watts (The Nature of Consciousness (lectures))
15. You're under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago. — Alan Watts (lectures)
16. According to convention, I am not simply what I am doing now. I am also what I have done, and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost more the real "me" than what I am at this moment. — Alan Watts (The Way of Zen (1957))
17. Behind the scene, under the surface of reality, you are all actors, marvelously skilled at playing parts and in getting lost in the mazes of your own minds—but behind the scenes, in the green room, you always have a sneaking suspicion that you might not be the you that you think you are. — Alan Watts (lectures)
18. I can't be honest because I don't fully know what I am. Consciousness peers out from a center which it cannot see—and that is the root of the matter. — Alan Watts (The Joyous Cosmology (1962))
19. If you know that "I", in the sense of the person, the front, the ego, it really doesn't exist. Then… it won't go to your head too badly, if you wake up and discover that you're God. — Alan Watts (Alan Watts Teaches Meditation (1992))

Time and the Present Moment

1. 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. — Alan Watts (lectures)
2. 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 infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
3. Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
4. For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
5. For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere. — Alan Watts (The Way of Zen (1957))
6. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality. — Alan Watts (The Way of Zen (1957))
7. The future is a concept—it doesn't exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be because time is always now. — Alan Watts (lectures)
8. Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present. — Alan Watts (lectures)
9. Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present. — Alan Watts (lectures)
10. Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal. For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever. — Alan Watts (Become What You Are (lectures))
11. We are seeing, then, that our experience is altogether momentary. From one point of view, each moment is so elusive and so brief that we cannot even think about it before it has gone. From another point of view, this moment is always here, since we know no other moment than the present moment. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
12. The brain can only assume its proper behavior when consciousness is doing what it is designed for: not writhing and whirling to get out of present experience, but being effortlessly aware of it. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
13. Human beings appear to be happy just so long as they have a future to which they can look forward—whether it be a "good time" tomorrow or an everlasting life beyond the grave. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
14. If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
15. 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. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
16. Time itself is a creation of the restless mind; space has been created by the same mind to give itself room to wander when in fact there is no space beyond a mental construct that, like all constructs, eventually turns into a prison. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
17. If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
18. To be forever looking beyond is to remain blind to what is here. — Alan Watts (Nature, Man and Woman (1958))

Love and Relationships

1. There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
2. Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command. — Alan Watts (Nature, Man and Woman (1958))
3. The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion. — Alan Watts (lectures)
4. So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself. — Alan Watts (lectures)
5. Love is not something that is a sort of rare commodity. Everybody has it. Existence is love. — Alan Watts (The Spectrum of Love (lectures))
6. I knew a little girl to whom someone gave a bunny rabbit. She was so delighted with the bunny rabbit and so afraid of losing it, that taking it home in the car, she squeezed it to death with love. And lots of parents do that to their children. And lots of spouses do it to each other. They hold on too hard, and so take the life out of this transient, beautifully fragile thing that life is. To have it, to have life, and to have its pleasure, you must at the same time let go of it. — Alan Watts (lectures)
7. Living, loving, being natural or sincere—all these are spontaneous forms of behavior: they happen "of themselves" like digesting food or growing hair. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
8. Our trouble is that we have ignored and thus feel insecure in the enormous spectrum of love which lies between rather formal friendship and genital sexuality, and thus are always afraid that once we overstep the bounds of formal friendship we must slide inevitably to the extreme of sexual promiscuity. — Alan Watts (The Joyous Cosmology (1962))
9. People tend to distinguish between the various kinds of love; there are good kinds, such as divine charity, and allegedly bad kinds, such as animal lust. But it should be understood that they are all forms of the same thing—just as the colors of white light divide into the spectrum when passed through a prism. — Alan Watts (The Spectrum of Love (lectures))
10. Kindly let me help you or you will drown said the monkey putting the fish safely up a tree. — Alan Watts (lectures)
11. When you tell a girl how beautiful she is, she will say, "Now isn't that just like a man! All you men think about is bodies." Poor little chauffeur! All she is saying is that she has lost touch with her own astonishing wisdom and ingenuity. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
12. The answer to the problem of suffering is not away from the problem but in it. The inevitability of pain will not be met by deadening sensitivity but by increasing it, by exploring and feeling out the manner in which the natural organism itself wants to react. — Alan Watts (Nature, Man and Woman (1958))
13. 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. — Alan Watts (The Way of Zen (1957))
14. Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
15. The further truth that the undivided mind is aware of experience as a unity, of the world as itself, suggests a state that would usually be called love. For the love that expresses itself in creative action is something much more than an emotion. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
16. Peace can be made only by those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love. No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart. — Alan Watts (Does It Matter? (1970))
17. Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
18. The morality that goes with this understanding is, above all, the frank recognition of your dependence upon enemies, underlings, out-groups, and, indeed, upon all other forms of life whatsoever. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))

Death and Impermanence

1. What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
2. Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that "I" and all other "things" now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
3. Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up… now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep. — Alan Watts (Out of Your Mind (lectures))
4. It is in vain that doctors prolong life if we spend the extra time being anxious to live still longer. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
5. Nothing is more creative than death, since it is the whole secret of life. It means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that "I" cannot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
6. As long as you do not know how to die and come to life again, you are but a sorry traveler on this dark earth. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
7. Death seems simply to be a return to that unknown inwardness out of which we were born… the truly inward source of one's life was never born… Outwardly I am one apple among many. Inwardly I am the tree. — Alan Watts (lectures)
8. What will happen to me when I die is, after all, like asking what happens to my fist when I open my hand. — Alan Watts (lectures)
9. And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light. I return in every baby born. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
10. The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing. Because life is a flowing process, change and death are its necessary parts. To work for their exclusion is to work against life. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
11. Wouldn't it be as farfetched to call birth the cause of death as to call the cat's head the cause of the tail? Lifting the neck of a bottle implies lifting the bottom as well, for the "two parts" come up at the same time. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
12. One day you are going to wake up and say, why, that's me! And in knowing that, know, you see, that you never die. That you are the eternal thing that comes and goes, that appears now as John Jones, now as Mary Smith, now as Betty Brown, and so it goes forever and ever and ever. — Alan Watts (Man in Nature (lectures))
13. For there is no joy in continuity, in the perpetual. We desire it only because the present is empty. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
14. Life keeps moving on, and yet remains profoundly rooted in the present, seeking no result, for the present has spread out from its constriction in an elusive pin-point of strained consciousness to an all-embracing eternity. — Alan Watts (Nature, Man and Woman (1958))
15. Life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself. In this moment it is finished. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
16. Because all is lost, there is nothing to lose. — Alan Watts (lectures)
17. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment… only to vanish forever. — Alan Watts (Does It Matter? (1970))
18. If we get rid of all wishful thinking and dubious metaphysical speculations, we can hardly doubt that—at a time not too distant—each one of us will simply cease to be. — Alan Watts (lectures)

Fear, Anxiety and Worry

1. Running away from fear is fear; fighting pain is pain; trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
2. To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
3. One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt. — Alan Watts (Psychotherapy East and West (1961))
4. To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
5. It must be obvious… that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
6. No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen. — Alan Watts (lectures)
7. The person who is constantly anxious is the person who is resisting the flip-flopability of things. — Alan Watts (lectures)
8. It seems that if I am afraid, then I am "stuck" with fear. But in fact I am chained to the fear only so long as I am trying to get away from it. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
9. There is, indeed, a viewpoint from which this "rationalization" of life is not rational. The brain is clever enough to see the vicious circle which it has made for itself. But it can do nothing about it. Seeing that it is unreasonable to worry does not stop worrying; rather, you worry the more at being unreasonable. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
10. The frightened mind that runs away from everyday terrors meets the seeking mind that wants a better world. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
11. Those who believe more firmly in the Devil than in God are always afraid that if they let go, the Devil will take over first, unaware that not having let go is the Devil already in full control. — Alan Watts (Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown (lectures))
12. 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 Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
13. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
14. I have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort. Sometimes I call it the "backwards law." When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float. When you hold your breath, you lose it. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
15. The question "What shall we do about it?" is only asked by those who do not understand the problem. If a problem can be solved at all, to understand it and to know what to do about it are the same thing. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
16. How many of us now realize that space is the same thing as mind, or consciousness? That when you look out into infinity you are looking at yourself? … To be afraid of life is to be afraid of yourself. — Alan Watts (Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown (lectures))
17. The agnostic, the skeptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy; it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
18. 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. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))

Freedom and Letting Go

1. People can't be talked out of illusions. If a person believes that the earth is flat, you can't talk him out of that, he knows that it's flat. He'll go down to the window and see that it's obvious, it looks flat. So the only way to convince him that it isn't is to say, "Well let's go and find the edge." — Alan Watts (lectures)
2. Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don't grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do you will become stiff and tight in the water, and sink. You have to relax, and the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging, and holding on. — Alan Watts (lectures)
3. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would "lief" or wish it to be. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
4. 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, openness—an act of trust in the unknown. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
5. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be. — Alan Watts (lectures)
6. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen. — Alan Watts (The Joyous Cosmology (1962))
7. The knowledge of the past stays with us. To let go is simply to release any images and emotions. — Alan Watts (lectures)
8. A man does not really begin to be alive until he has lost himself, until he has released the anxious grasp which he normally holds upon his life, his property, his reputation and position. — Alan Watts (Become What You Are (lectures))
9. Nothing fails like success—because the self-imposed task of our society and all its members is a contradiction: to force things to happen which are acceptable only when they happen without force. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
10. We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision, and involuntary when they happen without decision. But if decision itself were voluntary, every decision would have to be preceded by a decision to decide—an infinite regression which fortunately does not occur. — Alan Watts (The Way of Zen (1957))
11. As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
12. I have always done things in my own way, which is at once the way that comes naturally to me, that is honest, sincere, genuine, and unforced. — Alan Watts (In My Own Way (1972))
13. The future is unknown. Prophecy contaminates it with the past, which is why liberated people do not bother with fortunetelling or astrology, and why the happy traveler wanders and does not let himself be the slave of maps, guidebooks, and schedules, using them but not being used by them. — Alan Watts (Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown (lectures))
14. Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
15. Those who speak, do not know; those who know, do not speak. — Alan Watts (What Is Tao? (lectures))
16. Do you suppose that God takes himself seriously? I know a Zen master, Joshu Sasaki, who has let it be known that the best form of meditation is to stand up with your hands on your hips and roar with laughter for ten minutes every morning. — Alan Watts (In My Own Way (1972))
17. I owe my solitude to other people. — Alan Watts (In My Own Way (1972))
18. Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair. — Alan Watts (What Is Tao? (lectures))

Consciousness and Reality

1. What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself. — Alan Watts (The Nature of Consciousness (lectures))
2. Everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. — Alan Watts (The Nature of Consciousness (lectures))
3. 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 Watts (Does It Matter? (1970))
4. The world outside your skin is just as much you as the world inside: they move together inseparably. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
5. 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. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
6. Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
7. You want to know what reality is, you must look directly at it and see for yourself. But this needs a certain kind of concentration, because reality is not symbols, it is not words and thoughts, it is not reflections and fantasies. — Alan Watts (Become What You Are (lectures))
8. A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion. — Alan Watts (Alan Watts Teaches Meditation (1992))
9. And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words… As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning. — Alan Watts (lectures)
10. 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 (lectures)
11. When you start probing into the inner workings of the human body you come across all kinds of funny little monsters and wiggly things… But what we will always find out in the end when we meet the very strange thing, there will one day be the dawning recognition: Why that's me. — Alan Watts (lectures)
12. 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 Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
13. All too easily, we confuse the world as we symbolize it with the world as it is. As semanticist Alfred Korzybski used to say, it is an urgent necessity to distinguish between the map and the territory and, he might have added, between the flag and the country. — Alan Watts (Does It Matter? (1970))
14. Discord on one level is harmony on another. — Alan Watts (lectures)
15. Consciousness seems to be nature's ingenious mode of self-torture. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
16. Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
17. This mysterious something has been called God, the Absolute, Nature, Substance, Energy, Space, Ether, Mind, Being, the Void, the Infinite—names and ideas which shift in popularity and respectability with the winds of intellectual fashion. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
18. One sees that all explicit opposites are implicit allies—correlative in the sense that they "go with" each other and cannot exist apart. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
19. Actually, the world is not complex. It is the task of trying to figure it out with words or numbers that is complex. — Alan Watts (lectures)
20. Indeed, the power of words has gone to man's head in more than one way. To define has come to mean almost the same thing as to understand. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))

Work, Play and Purpose

1. 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. — Alan Watts (The Essence of Alan Watts (1977))
2. What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life? — Alan Watts (What If Money Were No Object (lectures))
3. What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like? — Alan Watts (What If Money Were No Object (lectures))
4. 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 things you don't like doing, which is stupid. — Alan Watts (What If Money Were No Object (lectures))
5. The difference between having a job and having a vocation is that a job is some unpleasant work you do in order to make money, with the sole purpose of making money. — Alan Watts (lectures)
6. 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. — Alan Watts (What If Money Were No Object (lectures))
7. No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. — Alan Watts (lectures)
8. A world which increasingly consists of destinations without journeys between them, a world which values only "getting somewhere" as fast as possible, becomes a world without substance. — Alan Watts (The Way of Zen (1957))
9. A life full of goals and end-points is like trying to abate one's hunger by eating merely the two precise ends of a banana. The concrete reality of the banana is, on the contrary, all that lies between the two ends, the journey as it were. — Alan Watts (Nature, Man and Woman (1958))
10. Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
11. They fail to live because they are always preparing to live. Instead of earning a living they are mostly earning an earning. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
12. A successful college president once complained to me, "I'm so busy that I'm going to have to get a helicopter!" Well, I answered, "you'll be ahead so long as you're the only president who has one. But don't get it. Everyone will expect more out of you." — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
13. For the trouble with our rich and powerful people is not so much that they are wicked, but that they do not enjoy themselves. — Alan Watts (Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown (lectures))
14. How long have the planets been circling the sun? Are they getting anywhere, and do they go faster and faster in order to arrive? How often has the spring returned to the earth? — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
15. You may think there's no point in singing unless you are good at it, but that is like saying there is no point in doing anything at all unless you are particularly gifted at it, which is ridiculous. — Alan Watts (Still the Mind (lectures))
16. The whole world is seen as the lila and the maya of the Self, the first word meaning "play" and the second having the complex sense of illusion. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
17. At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but they do not seem to make a "problem" of it. For the animal, happiness consists in enjoying life in the immediate present—not in the assurance that there is a whole future of joys ahead of him. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
18. It's absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don't like, in order to go on spending things you don't like, doing things you don't like and to teach our children to follow in the same track. — Alan Watts (What If Money Were No Object (lectures))
19. If you do really like what you're doing, it doesn't matter what it is, you can eventually become a master of it. It's the only way to become a master of something, to be really with it. — Alan Watts (What If Money Were No Object (lectures))

God, Religion and Spirituality

1. I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek. — Alan Watts (The Two Hands of God (1963))
2. There is obviously a place in life for a religious attitude for awe and astonishment at existence. That is also a basis for respect for existence. — Alan Watts (Images of God (lectures))
3. Truly religious people always make jokes about their religion; their faith is so strong that they can afford it. — Alan Watts (In My Own Way (1972))
4. Religion is always falling apart. — Alan Watts (Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion (lectures))
5. The whole history of religion is a history of the failure of preaching. Preaching is moral violence. — Alan Watts (The Spectrum of Love (lectures))
6. Everyone has a religion, whether admitted or not, because it is impossible to be human without having some basic assumptions (or intuitions) about existence and the good life. — Alan Watts (In My Own Way (1972))
7. A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter. — Alan Watts (Beyond Theology (1964))
8. Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they'll say you're crazy and you're blasphemous, and they'll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, "My goodness, I've just discovered that I'm God," they'll laugh and say, "Oh, congratulations, at last you found out." — Alan Watts (The Essential Alan Watts (lectures))
9. Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior. — Alan Watts (lectures)
10. An ardent Jehovah's Witness once tried to convince me that if there were a God of love, he would certainly provide mankind with a reliable and infallible textbook for the guidance of conduct. I replied that no considerate God would destroy the human mind by making it so rigid and unadaptable as to depend upon one book, the Bible, for all the answers. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
11. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency. — Alan Watts (Does It Matter? (1970))
12. Speaking as of today, I do not consider it intellectually respectable to be a partisan in matters of religion. I see religion as I see such other basic fascinations as art and science, in which there is room for many different approaches, styles, techniques, and opinions. — Alan Watts (In My Own Way (1972))
13. The common error of ordinary religious practice is to mistake the symbol for the reality, to look at the finger pointing the way and then to suck it for comfort rather than follow it. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
14. Now I'm sure that most of you know the old story about the astronaut, who went far out into space, and was asked on his return whether he'd been to heaven and seen God. And he said: "Yes". And so they said to him: "Well, what about God?" And he said: "She's Black". — Alan Watts (The Nature of God (lectures))
15. It is especially important for Westerners to understand that high lamas, Zen masters, and Hindu gurus in the discipline of yoga are human beings, not supermen. — Alan Watts (Foreword to The Secret Oral Teachings in the Tibetan Buddhist Sects (1964))
16. God in Indian mythology is the self, Satcitananda… In other words, what exists, reality itself is gorgeous, it is the fullness of total joy. — Alan Watts (The Nature of Consciousness (lectures))
17. For man seems to be unable to live without myth, without the belief that the routine and drudgery, the pain and fear of this life have some meaning and goal in the future. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
18. We can't reimpose old myths on ourselves or believe in new ones made up out of a desire for comfort; therefore, the path of self-examination is the only one a person of conscience can reasonably follow. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
19. Most of us believe in order to feel secure, in order to make our individual lives seem valuable and meaningful. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
20. Idolatry is not the use of images, but confusing them with what they represent, and in this respect mental images and lofty abstractions can be more insidious than bronze idols. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))

Society and the Modern World

1. I am amazed that Congressmen can pass a bill imposing severe penalties on anyone who burns the American flag, whereas they are responsible for burning that for which the flag stands. — Alan Watts (Individual and Society (lectures))
2. When it comes down to it, government is simply an abandonment of responsibility on the assumption that there are people, other than ourselves, who really know how to manage things. But the government, run ostensibly for the good of the people, becomes a self-serving corporation. — Alan Watts (lectures)
3. 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. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
4. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
5. Naturally, it isn't the mere fact of being named that brings about the hoax of being a "real person"; it is all that goes with it. The child is tricked into the ego-feeling by the attitudes, words, and actions of the society which surrounds him—his parents, relatives, teachers, and, above all, his similarly hoodwinked peers. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
6. Money is a way of measuring wealth but is not wealth in itself. A chest of gold coins or a fat wallet of bills is of no use whatsoever to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft. — Alan Watts (Does It Matter? (1970))
7. A particularly significant example of brain against body, or measures against matter, is urban man's total slavery to clocks. A clock is a convenient device for arranging to meet a friend… Clocks should not be smashed; they should simply be kept in their place. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
8. Thus the "brainy" economy designed to produce this happiness is a fantastic vicious circle which must either manufacture more and more pleasures or collapse—providing a constant titillation of the ears, eyes, and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost inescapable noise and visual distractions. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
9. If the human race develops an electronic nervous system, outside the bodies of individual people, thus giving us all one mind and one global body, this is almost precisely what has happened in the organization of cells which compose our own bodies. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
10. Among the educated young there is therefore a startling and unprecedented interest in the transformation of human consciousness. All over the Western world publishers are selling millions of books dealing with Yoga, Vedanta, Zen Buddhism, and the chemical mysticism of psychedelic drugs. — Alan Watts (Does It Matter? (1970))
11. We are therefore a civilization which suffers from chronic disappointment—a formidable swarm of spoiled children smashing their toys. — Alan Watts (Does It Matter? (1970))
12. 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 (Does It Matter? (1970))
13. Now it is symptomatic of our rusty-beer-can type of sanity that our culture produces very few magical objects. Jewelry is slick and uninteresting. Architecture is almost totally bereft of exuberance, obsessed with erecting glass boxes. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
14. The startling truth is that our best efforts for civil rights, international peace, population control, conservation of natural resources, and assistance to the starving of the earth—urgent as they are—will destroy rather than help if made in the present spirit. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
15. For, as things stand, we have nothing to give. If our own riches and our own way of life are not enjoyed here, they will not be enjoyed anywhere else. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
16. Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. — Alan Watts (lectures)
17. We are convinced that sleep is a waste of valuable time and continue to chase these fantasies far into the night. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
18. We have scrubbed the world clean of magic. We have lost even the vision of paradise, so that our artists and craftsmen can no longer discern its forms. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))

Mindfulness and Meditation

1. 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. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment. — Alan Watts (Still the Mind (lectures))
2. There is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to "get culture" or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
3. To look at life without words is not to lose the ability to form words—to think, remember, and plan. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
4. When you look at the clouds they are not symmetrical. They do not form fours and they do not come along in cubes, but you know at once that they are not a mess. Now, take a look at yourselves. You are all wiggly. — Alan Watts (The Tao of Philosophy (lectures))
5. Self-consciousness is a stoppage because it is like interrupting a song after every note so as to listen to the echo, and then feeling irritated because of the loss of rhythm. — Alan Watts (Become What You Are (lectures))
6. Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them. — Alan Watts (lectures)
7. The transformation of human consciousness through meditation is frustrated, as long as we think of it in terms as something that I, my self can bring about. — Alan Watts (Alan Watts Teaches Meditation (1992))
8. A certain amount of "sitting just to sit" might well be the best thing in the world for the jittery minds and agitated bodies. — Alan Watts (The Way of Zen (1957))
9. Taoists do not look upon meditation as "practice," except in the sense that a doctor "practices" medicine. They have no design to subjugate or alter the universe by force or willpower, for their art is entirely to go along with the flow of things in an intelligent way. — Alan Watts (Tao: The Watercourse Way (1975))
10. 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. — Alan Watts (Still the Mind (lectures))
11. To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, "I am listening to this music," you are not listening. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
12. It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about "I." — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
13. Listen intently to a voice singing without words. It may charm you into crying, force you to dance, fill you with rage, or make you jump for joy. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
14. Most of us assume as a matter of common sense that space is nothing, that it's not important and has no energy. But as a matter of fact, space is the basis of existence. — Alan Watts (lectures)
15. But in reality we cannot compare joy with sorrow. Comparison is possible only by the very rapid alternation of two states of mind, and you cannot switch back and forth between the genuine feelings of joy and sorrow as you can shift your eyes between a cat and a dog. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
16. We see what we believe rather than what we see. — Alan Watts (Attributed to Alan Watts)
17. Certainly the revolutionary thinker must go beyond thought. He knows that almost all his best ideas come to him when thinking has stopped. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
18. Although the rhythm of the waves beats a kind of time, it is not clock or calendar time. It has no urgency. It happens to be timeless time. — Alan Watts (lectures)

The Meaning of Life

1. The more we accustom ourselves to understanding the present in terms of memory, the unknown by the known, the living by the dead, the more desiccated and embalmed, the more joyless and frustrated life becomes. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
2. Let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time. And finally, you would dream … where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today. — Alan Watts (lectures)
3. Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun. — Alan Watts (lectures)
4. You have seen that the universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game, and that there is no separate "you" to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
5. There is simply no problem of life; it is absolutely purposeless play; it doesn't have to continue; there is no reason whatever to explain it, for explanations are just another form of complexity, a new manifestation of life on top of life, gestures gesturing. — Alan Watts (The Collected Letters of Alan Watts (lectures))
6. So, according to Vedanta, the central doctrine of Hinduism, all bodies are the clothes of the one and only Self in its innumerable disguises, and the whole universe is a masquerade ball pretending to be a tragedy and then realizing that it's a ball. — Alan Watts (Does It Matter? (1970))
7. Existence is basically a kind of dancing or music—an immensely complex energy pattern which needs no explanation other than itself—just as we do not ask what is the meaning of fugues by Bach or sonatas by Mozart. We do not dance to reach a certain point on the floor, but simply to dance. — Alan Watts (lectures)
8. As Aristotle put it, the beginning of philosophy is wonder. I am simply amazed to find myself living on a ball of rock that swings around an immense spherical fire. I am more amazed that I am a maze—a complex wiggliness, an arabesque of tubes, filaments, cells, fibers, and films that are various kinds of palpitation in this stream of liquid energy. — Alan Watts (Does It Matter? (1970))
9. It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd—uncanny and highly improbable. G. K. Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at a gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don't. — Alan Watts (The Book (1966))
10. 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 (The Book (1966))
11. Camus said there is only really one serious philosophical question, which is whether or not to commit suicide. I think there are four or five serious philosophical questions: The first one is: Who started it? The second is: Are we going to make it? The third is: Where are we going to put it? The fourth is: Who's going to clean up? And the fifth: Is it serious? — Alan Watts (Out of Your Mind (lectures))
12. If we are open only to discoveries which will accord with what we know already, we may as well stay shut. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
13. The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
14. 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. — Alan Watts (lectures)
15. God likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside of God, he has no one but himself to play with! But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. — Alan Watts (lectures)
16. It is in vain that we can predict and control the course of events in the future, unless we know how to live in the present. — Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951))
17. 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. — Alan Watts (lectures)
18. The concepts of health and sickness, good and evil, better and worse, have the same use and relation to life as those of long and short, high and low to carpentry. — Alan Watts (Does It Matter? (1970))

How to Use These Alan Watts Quotes

• Morning reflection: read one line slowly and let it undo something you are sure about.
• Journaling: copy the line that annoys you a little — that’s usually the one you need.
• Talks and essays: his lines on the ego, time, and play land hard; cite the book or lecture.
• Hard weeks: the fear and death sections were written by a man who faced both honestly — read them when things break.
• Sharing: use the copy button on any numbered quote above to share it exactly as written.

More Alan Watts Quotes to Explore

• motivational quotes for success
• inspirational quotes for life
• wisdom quotes
• stoic quotes
• Marcus Aurelius quotes
• Seneca quotes
• Ernest Hemingway quotes
• life quotes
• love quotes
• hope quotes
• courage quotes
• book quotes
• perseverance quotes
• gratitude quotes
• The Alan Watts Organization

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Alan Watts?

Alan Wilson Watts (1915–1973) was a British-born philosopher, writer, and speaker who brought Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and Eastern thought to Western audiences. His books The Way of Zen (1957), The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951), and The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966) remain classics, and his recorded lectures still reach millions.

What is Alan Watts’ most famous quote?

“What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?” — from his lecture “What If Money Were No Object,” it is the line that defines his message about purpose and play.

Did Alan Watts really say “The menu is not the meal”?

The line circulates widely as his, and it matches his teaching, but no exact source has been located in his books or transcribed lectures — so it is kept here with an honest “Attributed to Alan Watts” label, as are three other disputed lines.

Which book should I read first?

The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) for a short, direct taste, or The Book (1966) for the full philosophy of the self. For lectures, “Out of Your Mind” and “The Nature of Consciousness” are the best starting points.