Alan Watts — English Philosopher born on January 06, 1915, died on November 16, 1973
Alan Wilson Watts was a British-born philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest in 1945, then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies (Wikipedia) Alan Watts Quotes
1. Your body does not eliminate poisons by knowing their names. To try to control fear or depression or boredom by calling them names is to resort to superstition of trust in curses and invocations. It is so easy to see why this does not work. Obviously, we try to know, name, and define fear in order to make it “objective,” that is, separate from “I.
2. The problem comes up because we ask the question in the wrong way. We supposed that solids were one thing and space quite another, or just nothing whatever. Then it appeared that space was no mere nothing, because solids couldn’t do without it. But the mistake in the beginning was to think of solids and space as two different things, instead of as two aspects of the same thing. The point is that they are different but inseparable, like the front end and the rear end of a cat. Cut them apart, and the cat dies.
3. There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again.
4. 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, which is stupid.
5. 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.
6. Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
7. One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.
8. 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.
9. What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.
10. Philosophy is man’s expression of curiosity about everything and his attempt to make sense of the world primarily through his intellect.
11. Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.
12. Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
13. Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the Gods made for fun.
14. 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.
15. Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.
16. Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
17. It’s better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing, than a long life spent in a miserable way.
18. There will always be suffering. But we must not suffer over the suffering.
19. Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree.
20. The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
21. 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.
22. When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was.
23. Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.
24. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
25. The sense of wrong is simply failure to see where something fits into a pattern, to be confused as to the hierarchical level upon which an event belongs.
26. You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.
27. To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.
28. The more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love.
29. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.
30. There is always something taboo, something repressed, un-admitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one’s eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion.
31. No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now. 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.
32. 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.
33. If you really understand Zen… you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because… the sound of the rain needs no translation.
34. Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up… now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.
35. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
36. Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal, for the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever.
37. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
38. 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.
39. Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith in life, in other people, and in oneself, is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.
40. Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.
41. Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
42. What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.
