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. - Alan W. Watts
If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid. - Alan W. Watts
In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself. - Alan W. Watts
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. - Alan W. Watts
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. - Alan W. Watts
Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content. - Alan W. Watts
The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion. - Alan W. Watts
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself. - Alan W. Watts
Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality. - Alan W. Watts
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun. - Alan W. Watts
Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior. - Alan W. Watts
You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean. - Alan W. Watts
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. - Alan W. Watts
Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering. - Alan W. Watts
Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone. - Alan W. Watts
It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description. - Alan W. Watts
There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know. - Alan W. Watts
The knowledge of the past stays with us. To let go is simply to release any images and emotions. - Alan W. Watts
Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body, he 'has' a body. Instead of living and loving he 'has' instincts for survival and copulation. - Alan W. Watts
A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter. - Alan W. Watts
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. - Alan W. Watts
It is both dangerous and absurd for our world to be a group of communions mutually excommunicate. - Alan W. Watts
Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know. - Alan W. Watts
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. - Alan W. Watts
The source of all light is in the eye. - Alan W. Watts
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. - Alan W. Watts
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. - Alan W. Watts
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. - Alan W. Watts
If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed - Alan W. Watts
And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning. - Alan W. Watts
When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of … Nothing is left but to love. - Alan W. Watts
So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself. - Alan W. Watts
I owe my solitude to other people. - Alan W. Watts
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe. - Alan W. Watts
To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead. - Alan W. Watts
The menu is not the meal. - Alan W. Watts
Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated - Alan W. Watts
Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them. - Alan W. Watts
Philosophers, for example, often fail to recognize that their remarks about the universe apply also to themselves and their remarks. If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. - Alan W. Watts
There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said. - Alan W. Watts