Top 50 most searched quotes by Alan Watts

The allure of Alan Watts wisdom echoes through the digital realm, as his top 50 most searched quotes continue to enthrall seekers of philosophical enlightenment. Each quote acts as a beacon, drawing individuals into Watts’ profound insights on existence, spirituality, and the human psyche. The widespread search for these quotes reflects a collective yearning for deeper understanding and meaning in a complex world. From contemplations on the nature of reality to reflections on consciousness, Alan Watts’ quotes stand as timeless jewels of contemplation and insight.

• Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be
• Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had.
• By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us.
• 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.
• No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.

• Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.
• 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.
• 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 a causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality.
• You are the universe experiencing itself.
• 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. That’s one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now.

• The menu is not the meal.
• People sometimes fail to live because they are always preparing to live.
• 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.
• By going out of your mind, you come to your senses
• All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head.

• The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
• 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.
• We see what we believe rather than what we see.
• We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we’re in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back from the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see it’s like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that…Also, watch the flow of music. The melody as its expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence…you wait till later to find out what the sentence means…The present is always changing the past.
• Of course, you can’t force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flatiron. Water becomes clear and calm only when left alone.

• Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.
• As muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone, it could be argued that those who sit quietly and do nothing are making one of the best possible contributions to a world in turmoil.
• You must not be afraid of playing wrong notes. Just forget it, play it wrong! But play!
• 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. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, “Now, I’ve arrived!” Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.
• Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure.

• Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
• Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone.
• To go out of your mind at least once a day is tremendously important. By going out of your mind, you come to your senses.
• The destination of life is this eternal moment.
• 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.

• Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
• To go out of your mind once a day is tremendously important, because by going out of your mind you come to your senses. And if you stay in your mind all of the time, you are over rational, in other words you are like a very rigid bridge which because it has no give; no craziness in it, is going to be blown down by the first hurricane.
• The ‘you’ who you think you are does not exist.
• What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?
• Your soul isn’t in your body; your body is in your soul!

• If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives we may forget altogether to live them.
• What keeps us from happiness is our inability to fully inhabit the present
• Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
• Enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy… your entire education has has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.
• You, yourself, are the eternal energy which appears as this Universe. You didn’t come into this world; you came out of it. Like a wave from the ocean.

• Don’t hurry anything. Don’t worry about the future. Don’t worry about what progress you’re making. Just be entirely content to be aware of what is.
• 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.
• 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. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.
• Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.
• Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment.

• When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.
• Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.
• Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
• The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.
• 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.

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