What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.
ALAN WATTSOur pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
More Alan Watts Quotes
-
-
One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.
ALAN WATTS -
Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat’s entrails with horsehair.
ALAN 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 WATTS -
Only doubtful truths need defense.
ALAN WATTS -
Faith is an act of trust in the unknown.
ALAN WATTS -
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
ALAN 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 WATTS -
We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision.
ALAN 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 WATTS -
I owe my solitude to other people.
ALAN WATTS -
When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
ALAN WATTS -
If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.
ALAN WATTS -
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.
ALAN WATTS -
Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
ALAN 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 WATTS