Alan Watts Quotes

People sometimes fail to live because they are always preparing to live.

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it’s a drag? But you see, that’s what people do.

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it – aliens.

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

I owe my solitude to other people.

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

But to me nothing – the negative, the empty – is exceedingly powerful.

All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head.

Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.

No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

Faith is a state of openness or trust.

But I’ll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.