50 Alan Watts Quotes That’ll Blow Your Mind

The ones that you share with your friends, those you use to challenge your friends. Those you use to keep your friends awake at night.

His philosophy of Buddhism was well received by members of the Beat generation, such as Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso.

Watts was an inspirational speaker and is an example of a great leader, and we can all emulate his character.

Here are 50 of the best Alan Watts quotes that will blow your mind: It’s a wonder that something as small as an atom could be so powerful.

50 Alan Watts Quotes

When we are truly sensitive to pleasure, we are also sensitive to pain.

We can only fully live now, in each present moment. At all other times, the present moment is always being “gone” and “past”. We can only truly act now. We will always be acting here and now, no matter where we are or what we’re doing.

You can’t avoid suffering;
you just need to accept it as part of life and go on living. Suffering is inevitable, as are suffering’s friends,
like boredom, anger, unhappiness, anxiety, and confusion.
If you can get over the suffering, you can enjoy life more.

In order to create a healthy social atmosphere in which our group can flourish, a balance between free expression and mutual understanding is required. We have to respect each others points of view, and we have to do so in a constructive manner. We are unique manifestations of the Whole, and so are the values we bring in to a setting.

I don’t believe that change is something that should be feared. Change is a natural part of life, and if we keep our eyes open, we can always see opportunity for progress, even in the most difficult situations.

I’ll tell you what hermits do. They sit alone in the forest and they get quiet. They understand that they’re connected with everything.

When we get free from certain fixed ideas of how the world is, we find it far more subtle and far more miraculous than we thought it was.

8th of 50 Alan Watts Quotes

If you are swimming in uncertain waters, you have to trust yourself to the water. The only way you can do this is not by grasping on to anything external, rather, you just relax and float. This is what it means to have faith.

There is always something taboo, something repressed, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of your eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos.

I think the main theme of this section is to help you find an answer to the existential dilemma of “What do I want to do with my life?”. Because, like Alan Watts says, the past and the future, are what there is, and all there is, so, what is there is nothing but what you do now, right now, right now. So, in a very simple point of view, what you do now is what you do for the rest of the life.

If you play with your kids, you’re not “playing”. If you practice yoga, you’re not “playing”. If you’re writing, creating, or designing, you’re not “playing”. You’re “playing” with everything you do.

When you understand Zen, you can use any book. You can use the Bible. You can use Alice in Wonderland. You can use the dictionary — because the sound of the rain needs no translation.

Alan Watts told us that the goal of meditation is to go to sleep and never wake up. This is what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.

The world is filled with undefinable things that are everything. We can’t really put a name to them. We can only speak of them and explain and discuss what they are.

Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arriving in the moment in the immediate moment.

This means that we have failed to see how the events fit in a certain pattern that exists. We can learn from the mistake.

17th of 50 Alan Watts Quotes

It is impossible for the mind to think of no thought, because it is always producing thoughts.

Â When you were born, you were not born alone. You were born out of and with the universe.Â BeÂ mindfulÂ that you areÂ notÂ a separate person. You are interwoven in the fabric of the universe, a wave from the ocean, and you are not a stranger here.

You need to look at conventions in a way that encourages you to change them, not to accept them blindly.

A lot of people don’t want to face their problems head-on. They think that by avoiding them they can somehow avoid the pain that comes along with them. This is not the case.

When you look at yourself in the mirror, you will be able to recognize that you are the one who is trying to love yourself.

Spontaneity is the spontaneous attitude towards a situation. It is spontaneous because you are not trying to figure out how to solve a problem. You just let the situation unfold.

“Only to make the world understandable. Only to know.” If you do not understand then you make the world more confusing. So, only make the world understandable. Only make the world known.

Letting nature do the work does not always yield the best results. Sometimes we have to be the hands.

For every human being, the most important thing is to understand that we are just a reflection. We are a dream of the universe, like an apparition seen in a mirror.

As I said, I am not sure if this is in the spirit of Alan Watts, but I thought it was interesting. It is a bit different than what I usually do with how I am wording it. Normally, I do not take any quotes and just change the words to how I want to express it, but I am trying to write a more personal piece. So, hopefully, it is something like what I was going for.

27th of 50 Alan Watts Quotes

The feeling of love comes from the heart, and the best way to learn that is to open your heart and let your feelings flow, trust them and let them tell you what you need to hear.

What we call the world of our experience is, in fact, a limited perspective of a vast process, whose true nature is to extend endlessly.

In time, all that exists within the vastness of the process is a pattern or a pattern of patterns, just as we can perceive only a pattern of waves in the water.

To understand what is, there are two things to learn: to look properly, and to look without fear.

One day, a man woke up and thought to himself, “I am so happy. There is a circle, I made a circle, and the circle goes round and round, and so the world repeats itself over and over.” Then he fell asleep again.

The universe is one in which everything happens at the same time, like the ocean waves, and so if we say that one thing comes into the universe it means that the universe comes into it, or vice versa.

The meaning of life is to be alive. This is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, people rush around in great panic trying to achieve something beyond themselves. This is the paradox of life.

33rd of 50 Alan Watts Quotes

The best way to get rid of what you don’t understand is to understand that you can’t understand it.

Insecurity is the same as holding your breath. A person who lives as if he were invulnerable is simply holding his breath.

Life is all about being happy. The truth is that you are not going to achieve happiness while you are doing things you don’t like doing. So you have to break it down to something that you do like doing. You can’t get your happiness by just doing what you like.

The attitude of faith is to let go of the idea that you know what you believe, and to become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.

When the universe is in a state of expansion you are more flexible, more adaptable. When the universe is in a state of contraction you are less flexible, less adaptable.

38th of 50 Alan Watts Quotes

We live through pain and experience setbacks. We find happiness and pursue what we love. We have an impact on people and the world.

People who have a bad time of dieting think the menu is the meal. But it is not, because the menu is a mental state. To eat properly is to eat, but to eat for the wrong reason is not to eat.

Thinkers in our society are not our own, we are given ideas we did not think up. These thoughts came from our culture and our society, we did not invent them so we don’t invent them, we are not our own.

You don’t need to do anything. You are all just as extraordinary phenomena 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. You are all just that and there is nothing wrong with you at all.

You are the beginning and the end, the original one and the original source, the original force and the original creator, the one and the one who is the source, the creator and the creator of all. You are the original. You are the most original being who has ever existed. Your life is the original source and the original source to all beings.

It is a part of our nature to seek out experiences and things which cause us to feel joy. Things which are new make us feel good and give us pleasure. Because most things aren’t new, these experiences of newness have to be created. The greatest part of human activity is a means of creating the experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.

I am all that and more. I am the ocean. I am the wave. I am part of it, always and forever.

45th of 50 Alan Watts Quotes

It doesn’t matter if there is a right constellation or a wrong constellation. The important thing is to look at the universe and observe it.

Philosophy is the intellectual pursuit of understanding our world and the people around us, with the goal of finding meaning and purpose in life.

A human is a bundle of instincts. The brain is the organ that figures out what they are. I’m not sure where this quote came from, but I think I saw it in some book or another. It’s an interesting quote. I always felt like I wasn’t quite part of nature, or something.

God is the one who says that the eyes see, the ears hear, and the skin feels.
If the body is not aware of its own existence, then it’s not a body.
If the body is not aware of its own existence, then it’s not a body.

When you try to define or label yourself, you are really trying to bite your own teeth

This can be used in a variety of situations to create a feeling of superiority or superiority in another person.

We suffer because we take seriously things that aren’t serious; things that shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Alan Watts Inspirational Video

Summary

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