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Life Quotes by Alan Watts

71 Life quotes by Alan Watts

All Life quotes Alan Watts’s page

Life feels meaningless unless “I” can be permanent, a feeling compared to falling in love with an inch. The quotes suggest that meditation reveals life’s point in the immediate moment, and that death is a natural season like winter, where leaves fall and snow arrives. They warn against over‑improving ourselves at the cost of actually living.

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Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had.

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The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.

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Everyone is the fabric and structure of existence.

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In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.

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In life as well as in art Zen never wastes energy in stopping to explain; it only indicates.

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The more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually killing what we love.

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A living body is not a fixed thing, but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool.

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If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives we may forget altogether to live them.

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No worthwhile life can be lived without risks, despite current American superstitions to the contrary.

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The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from the giant pine, which lives for a thousand years.

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What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.

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Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.

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What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?

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To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.

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Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or…

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This-the immediate, everyday, and present experience-is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.

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The life of Zen begins, therefore, in a disillusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really exist the good without…

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Someone once described “Christian Secularism” as the assumption that there is nothing at all to life except a pilgrimage between the maternity…

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We are not clear as to the role in life of these chemicals; nor are we clear as to the role of…

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To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds…

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“Carried to its final extreme, the logical end of this type of reaction to life is suicide. The hard-bitten kind of person…

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Our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don't learn…

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Just what should a young man or woman know to be 'in the know'? Is there, in other words, some inside information,…

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By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear…

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We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have…

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What are plants doing? What are plants all about? They serve human beings by being decorative, but what is it from its…

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There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or…

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Everybody should do in their lifetime, sometime, two things. One is to consider death...to observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what…

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There is no mission, nor interest to convert, and yet I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal,…

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If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death - or shall…

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There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or…

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The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain,…

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“There is simply no problem of life; it is absolutely purposeless play; it doesn't have to continue; there is no reason whatever…

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“For there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people,are merely tubes which put…

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Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

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

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The destination of life is this eternal moment.

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There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied.

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No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility,…

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To feel life is meaningless unless "I" can be permanent is like having desperately fallen in love with an inch.

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More by Alan Watts

“The self-conscious feedback mechanism of the cortex allows us the hallucination that we are two souls in one body -a rational soul and an…

The more we try to catch hold of the present moment the more elusive it becomes. It is like trying to clutch water in…

The Universe is the game of the self, which plays hide and seek forever and ever.

If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall…

...mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.

The hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests.

Although profoundly "inconsequential," the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity,…

Everything is perpetually becoming new.

The psychotherapist ... tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to…

“As you make more and more powerful microscopic instruments, the universe has to get smaller and smaller in order to escape the investigation. Just…

We are at the moment looking at space as something to be entered by the tremendous thrust of a rocket because that is the…

A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.

The best way to convince someone is by making him realize that what you speak came from his own mind.

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of…

To feel that life is meaningless unless “I” can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch.