Alan Watts Quotes

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”

“This is the real secret of life - to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now.”

“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”

“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.”

“The attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.”

“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”

“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 an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future.”

“The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”

“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.”

“Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself.”

“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.”

“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”

“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.”

“The more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love.”

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”

“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 things you don't like doing.”

“The menu is not the meal.”

“We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the cosmos. We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.”

“To understand that there is no security is far more protective than to pretend there is.”