Quote

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

Alan Watts

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alan Watts
Age: 58 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 6
Died: 1973
Died: November 16
Anglican Priest
Author
Dramaturge
Musician
Philosopher
Theologian
Videographer
Writer
Kent
England
Like
Bite
Mindfulness
Bites
Define
Teeth
Identity
Humor
Trying

More quotes by Alan Watts

Image
The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security. On the other hand, the more we are forced to admit that we actually live in the real world, the more we feel ignorant, uncertain, and insecure about everything.
Alan Watts
Image
If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.
Alan Watts
Image
The point is seeing that THIS - the immediate, everyday and present experience - is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe. I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter.
Alan Watts
Image
To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.
Alan Watts
Image
You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.
Alan Watts
Image
Different Chinese philosophers, writing probably in 5-4 centuries B.C., presented some major ideas and a way of life that are nowadays known under the name of Taoism, the way of correspondence between man and the tendency or the course of natural world.
Alan Watts
Image
In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.
Alan Watts
Image
The more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually killing what we love.
Alan Watts
Image
There is an ineffable mystery that underlies ourselves and the world. It is the darkness from which the light shines. When you recognize the integrity of the universe and that death is as certain as birth, then you can relax and accept that this is the way it is. There is nothing else to do.
Alan Watts
Image
For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method.
Alan Watts
Image
What we need to realize is that there can be, shall we say, a movement, a stirring among people, which can be organically designed instead of politically designed.
Alan Watts
Image
I too realize that the less I preach the more likely I am to be heard.
Alan Watts
Image
Increasingly, we're developing all kinds of systems for verifying reality by echoing it.
Alan Watts
Image
Duality is always secretly unity.
Alan Watts
Image
You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.
Alan Watts
Image
People become concerned with being more humble than other people.
Alan Watts
Image
Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world — a place where they are one.
Alan Watts
Image
If you want to stay in a state of illusion, stay in it. But you can always wake up.
Alan Watts
Image
There is no coming toward it or going away from it it is, and you are it.
Alan Watts
Image
Chaos is always losing, but never defeated
Alan Watts