“Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.”
“The menu is not the meal.”
“You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.”
“The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.”
“The more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love.”
“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.”
“Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be.”
“The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.”
“To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead.”
“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim, you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead, you relax and float.”
“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.”
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.”
“You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.”
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
“Faith is a state of openness or trust.”
“A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.”
“No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.”
“No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.”
“You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.”
“You have to treat yourself like you matter because you do.”
“Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”
“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.”
“To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.”
“Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.”
“Peace can be made only by those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love.”
Alan Watts Quotes :
“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
“We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.”
“You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.”
“You can’t live at all unless you can live fully now.”
“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.”
“You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.”
“If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time.”
“The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”
“Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.”
“When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of… nothing is left but to love.”
“The source of all light is in the eye.”
“Nature is always changing, always has been, always will be. So if you think of security as something constant, you’re going to have a problem.”
“We are the universe experiencing itself.”
“Your body does not eliminate poisons by knowing their names.”
“We are always in the process of becoming and nothing is fixed.”
“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
“Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal.”
“A better world is not achieved through the destruction of the old one, but through the transformation of it.”
“I owe my solitude to other people.”
“The only Zen you’ll find on mountain tops is the Zen you bring up there with you.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”
“No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.”
“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.”
“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”
“Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.”
“The most dangerous person is the one who is afraid to tell the truth.”
“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.”
“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
“To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing.”
“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”
“What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean.”