Alan Watts philosopher – Best quotes about life

Alan Watts was an English philosopher, author, poet, and artist. His best known work is entitled: The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are . His quotes about life and spirituality can help you improve your life. Our Alan Watts guide will teach you about Alan Watts, his philosophy, his quotes, and his life.

Alan Watts was a British philosopher who is best known for his book The Wisdom of Insecurity. In this book, Watts talks about the importance of being comfortable with being uncomfortable. He says that we should learn to live in the tension between what is familiar and what is new.

Best quotes about life by Alan Watts philosopher

A collection of quotes and sayings that will enhance your wisdom, bring out your genius, and help you to connect with the world. Many of these sayings, proverbs and poems have proven inspirational to people and cultures across the world. These gems of thought encompass the spectrum of truth, wisdom and understanding.

Alan Wilson Watts was an English writer, speaker and self-styled ‘philosophical entertainer’, known for interpreting and popularizing Indian and Chinese traditions of Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience.

1. What people say is not the whole truth and therefore, like people, are limited.
2. It may be that life doesn’t exist, but, as far as I am concerned, I am a realist and I believe in the reality of life.
3. People are in a hurry to get to work. They are always huffing and puffing and scuffling along in the mire, and never seem to find the way. They forget that the world is being carried along in the same direction as they are. It is just that when they are trying to find the way, they don’t think they are part of the world at all, but look the world’s way and their way separately.
4. We do not make new facts; they are always there, but we have forgotten that all things are but the shadows and reflections of the great truth, not the truth itself.
5. We should realize that it never really happens, but only appears to take place, like a picture on a picture tube.
6. You cannot say I am, You are, or you are not. You can only say I am, I am, I am.
7. You see yourself as in one single story line as you do everything else in the world.
8. I know that the ultimate principle in a being, in everything, even in a stone, is to experience and enjoy itself. That is why you are here. You are here for your own experience.
9. For one who does not know a fact because the words for them are absent, there is no fact whatsoever. If, instead, he is ignorant of the words, he becomes so by thinking that they are his ideas. Since he takes himself to be a thinker, he ends by believing that he himself is an idea.
10. It is not possible to live in the world in which we must be afraid of the sun and stars and water and of winds—of nature—or afraid of nothing or afraid of everything. If we cannot live in nature, we must live in ourselves. There is no place where you can exist and be at one with the universe as well.
11. It can be as bad as you want it to be, and it can be very bad indeed.
12. We have become a part of the universe from which we come; to be a part is an extraordinary and miraculous thing. We are literally the most mysterious things in the universe.
13. We don’t see ourselves. We have always a vision of the world around us.
14. It seems we must all live in the present, in other times, in some other culture, in some other world. But the fact is that all the experiences of every culture, of every world, of every time, are simply our experiences in the present.
15. When you say to me, ‘Why should I be free?’ I tell you, ‘Why shouldn’t you?’
16. In the end we realize we are still only physical things, and the whole question of a continuous and personal universe is just a kind of joke to take the edge off our own insignificance.
17. It has now become a question of finding out how we can make the best use of the present moment to live a full and worthwhile life.
18. To say life is worth living is to say that you yourself are worth something.
19. In an ordinary social atmosphere most people don’t know what they are talking about. Most of their opinions are just meaningless echoes of the opinions of others. If people would get up and express an opinion in a room crowded with other people, they would not be much wiser than birds.
20. It is a strange thing that we are so much more capable of loving the physical universe than the other way round, and more capable of loving what we call non-physical than the physical. Our physical loves are not physical in the sense that you can put them in the microwave and heat them. The only way to make them physical is to burn the physical.
21. People will spend themselves trying to maintain the status quo in order to justify themselves, and in the effort to maintain it they become more rigid and less flexible.
22. The real is not what is perceived by the senses. What is perceived by them is the world of appearances, which is only the phenomenal aspect of reality. Behind the appearances are the real realities, which are so hidden and so deep that we only see their reflections in the world of appearances. But that is all the appearances are about. They are the reflections of that reality, and that is all there is.
23. It is quite obvious that there was once a time without history; that is, a time without I.
24. To be a human being means to be a small, solitary, lonesome creature, alone in the universe.
25. You are made of star stuff and everything you ever do, including even your thinking and your beliefs, comes from the structure of your cells.
26. In every moment of our life, we are one with the universe, and all that happens is simply a change of our relationship to the world.
27. All life is a matter of perspective. We need to put our minds to all things to be able to understand any.
28. One could define beauty as the capacity of matter to be aware of beauty.
29. “All that which is not death creates death. The way of escape from death is not the creation of death but its undoing.”
30. We may see our thoughts as an individual or as social phenomena. But there is really only thought there.
31. The more you try to do something, the less you accomplish- so remember that. It is an extremely important thing to know. People are always saying they want peace in their life, and then they go home and complain because they are worried and troubled. The way to have peace is to cease from all effort and to relax.
32. I believe, and I can’t prove it, that the real you and the real me are in reality the same.
33. We do not look at time as a river running from the distant past to the distant future; we look at it as an ocean into which each moment is the source of all the moments that come after it. There is just the present. That’s all there is.
34. We cannot get at a timeless existence through time. We say that ‘this moment is the time,’ when we could just as well as well say, ‘now,’ which does not mean a moment. ‘Now’ and ‘now’ are both ways of saying ‘all there is.’
35. You can’t live until you let life live.
36. It is not enough to be aware that you are in the circle of life, you have to be aware of you. It is so simple. The moment that anybody realizes that there isn’t any point in anything, then he does the work of the universe. He doesn’t have to work.
37. It is an illusion that we can solve problems and then stop. The real solution, the only permanent solution, is this: to learn how to see life in correct perspective.
38. The great illusion that we all live in here-all, the animals, and the people, and the plants and the rocks, and the whole business-is just that we are going on living out what we were living out the evening before, and will do the evening after that, and the evening after that, and so on, until we are not here at all and then we will do what we did at the time of our last big bang, or until we get blown out into whatever new thing we are going to do and say.
39. The greatest possible reality is not to have an illusion, which is not really real. The greatest reality is to be an illusion.
40. You may live for a little while in your private dream world, but you are still living as a part of the universe and you will return to it
41. When you go about your business, and then look back, you’ll be amazed at how much you have experienced.
42. When you have finished being afraid and trembling (the fear of death that you will die), you will become the one thing that is real, the thing that is timeless, the thing that is outside of time.’
43. It is not necessary to believe that life has meaning. But it is necessary to believe that there are more meaningful ways than there are non-meaningful ways to be alive.
44. If we try to understand something by asking other than who is it? – we have to go beyond who, otherwise we never get to the thing. And we never go past who is it?
45. If we look into our minds and see what they are made of, we will find nothing at all, or only some images and some memory, but no reality.
46. The idea that the physical world is a static fact is just one more illusion, because it is a static illusion.
47. If a child can do anything, he can be anything.
48. There’s just about enough of you, just about enough of me. And as if to show how little of us it really is, there isn’t much of it!
49. It is impossible for us to look within since we have not recognized the nature of our own thinking process.
50. I suggest that the time comes when the truth of a new experience is discovered by itself. It is only then that we understand the purpose of the experience, and discover what it is for. So that we do not get too far ahead of ourselves, what I am explaining comes first, and only then does the experience come. I use the word ‘experience’ carefully because we do not have a definite word to designate the experience, as they say, as they were talking about it in the old days, and of course now they don’t say it.
51. You can become a person only when you give up the idea that there is one thing called a person, and another thing you call you. You can become a person only when you see the person in a larger context.
52. Life should be enjoyed, not pondered, by each of us as he goes through it. You should not look for the meaning of life as if you were trying to walk on top of a mountain, or look at life as if you were looking through life, looking into the back of life.
53. You are not the same person over a week, over a month, over a year, or over a lifetime, and yet the difference is no more than that between a wave in a pond and the pond itself.
54. People are so afraid of death because they don’t believe the reality of the world in which they live.
55. We all need each other, without meaning to. If we didn’t need each other, we couldn’t have friends, and there wouldn’t be any families at all. We can’t even be happy except with other people.
56. The problem is a matter on which all philosophy and spiritual traditions have been mistaken. For when we are afraid of death or suffering, we run away from each other instead of working together for freedom and love. But death and suffering are not only a part of our life. They can only be understood in terms of the structure of our life.
57. Nothingness is not the same as nothing. Nothingness is the only thing.
58. We know this because we ourselves are a pattern of existence, and nothing more. We cannot say who we really are until after having described the world which is to say we cannot say who we are as we see ourselves acting.
59. We are all that we are because of our own consciousness.
60. You don’t become enlightened and then suddenly wake up and discover you have always been enlightened all your life.
61. We have not a past and we have not a future, but only the present.
62. We are all the same as far as any one of us is concerned.
63. The whole point of life is to create a condition which allows all these wonderful changes to happen without having your life thrown out.
64. When you are not in love, you’d better have something really nice to eat.
65. Man has taken himself out of nature, but he is still part of nature. It is as if our bodies had a way of making a way for themselves. I mean, if you could look through our bones, you would see that nature has made a route for itself here.
66. I do not want a religion of love. I want a religion of awareness that one is all that one is. That is the only religion I want. If we recognize that we belong to all of nature, then we have an answer which is valid for the whole world, for all of humanity – not just us, and not just for a select few. The idea is a world-encompassing awareness rather than a select few being aware of something that is not really theirs.
67. You need to be free, free from all that is dead.
68. You have never taken any trouble to do anything. It has taken you so long to do everything that you had to find means of doing it.
69. It is when you know who you are that life is worth living.
70. How are you going to have the good fortune to be someone who helps you to be yourself? That good fortune does not come through effort and work and sacrifice. You can be that person if you can see yourself.
71. Life has a way of coming out of nowhere, of surprising you and changing your whole point of view. We are too fixed in our ideas to realize that it is a continuous process.
72. When you see the things we think of as ordinary, they cease to have that effect upon us.
73. What we love most is death.
74. If you don’t want to feel lonely, then try to learn to love people. It is not a question of getting them to love you; you’re already lovable.
75. It is very important to remember that all our thoughts and actions and feelings are but an illusion of ourselves – like an actor on a stage, and not to be valued unless they are themselves valued.
76. If one could stop in time, one would find that all the experiences in one’s life had actually been present when one started.

What Is Familiar?

Alan Watts is often quoted as saying, “Everything is familiar. What you don’t know is strange.” In other words, everything we experience in life – the good, the bad and the ugly – is something that’s been experienced before by someone else. This makes us feel comfortable and safe, because we can rely on our experience to guide us. But this also means that we can’t really get too excited about anything, because nothing is really new or exciting.

What Is Uncomfortable?

Alan Watts once said, “The only way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” This is a profound statement that speaks to the importance of trusting our intuition and instincts. Too often we rely on our intellect and rational thought instead of our intuition and feelings. We need to experiment a little more and allow ourselves to be uncomfortable in order to learn what’s really important in life.

How To Live In The Tension Between These Two Things?

Alan Watts wrote: “The goal of living is to be happy. That is all.” In order to be happy, we must find a way to live in the tension between these two things: our individual desires and the needs of society. We must learn to live with uncertainty, ambiguity, and change. We must be patient and tolerant. Above all, we must trust in ourselves and our own abilities.

Conclusion:

Watts says that we should learn to live in the tension between what is familiar and what is new. This allows us to grow and evolve as people.

Alan Watts once said, “The only way to learn anything is to do it. There is no other way.” This is true not only for learning about life, but for learning anything at all. When we are constantly trying something new and different, we are learning. We are growing. And this growth is what leads us toward our ultimate destiny as human beings.

The familiar can be a drag on our growth. We can become so comfortable with the things that we know and the ways that we have always done things that we stop growing and evolving. We may even start to feel safe and secure in our routines, believing that they are who we are and what makes us special. This is how stagnation can set in and lead to a decline in our quality of  life.