Quote

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

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
Things
Intelligent
Wants
Fact
Individual
Difficult
Tick
Facts
Frustrated
Makes
Fascinated
Every
Oneself

More quotes by Alan Watts

Image
Chaos is always losing, but never defeated
Alan Watts
Image
Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we're not alone.
Alan Watts
Image
The truth is revealed by removing things that stand in its light, an art not unlike sculpture, in which the artist creates, not by building, but by hacking away.
Alan Watts
Image
... nets, grids, and other types of calculus.
Alan Watts
Image
There is a deep, peaceful calm in the dawning of a new day.
Alan Watts
Image
A scholar tries to learn something everyday a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
Alan Watts
Image
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
Image
They are enlightened who join in this play knowing it as play, for people suffer only because they take as serious what the gods made for fun.
Alan Watts
Image
The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.
Alan Watts
Image
For we have never actually understood the revolutionary sense beneath them – the incredible truth that what religion calls the vision of God is found in giving up any belief in the idea of God.
Alan Watts
Image
Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.
Alan Watts
Image
For a decision-the freest of my actions just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.
Alan Watts
Image
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.
Alan Watts
Image
You can't get wet from the word 'water.'
Alan Watts
Image
It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.
Alan Watts
Image
These people, as far as I can see, do not congregate in the notorious centers of the movement, like the North Beach in San Francisco or Greenwich Village, or Venice, California.
Alan Watts
Image
Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure.
Alan Watts
Image
A paradox is only a truth standing on its head to attract attention.
Alan Watts
Image
When one speaks of awakening, it means de-hypnotizatio n coming to your senses. But of course to do that, you have to go out of your mind.
Alan Watts
Image
To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely one with this universe.
Alan Watts