Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
Alan Watts
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Content
Material
Materials
Attractively
Pleasure
Packaged
Inspirational
Inferior
Inferiors
Pleasures
Symbols
More quotes by Alan Watts
What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?
Alan Watts
Everyone is the fabric and structure of existence.
Alan Watts
Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.
Alan Watts
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
Change is an illusion because we're always at the place where any future can take us.
Alan Watts
Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart.
Alan Watts
Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.
Alan Watts
The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.
Alan Watts
When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be.
Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
I want ... to consort with people whose emotions are not ... cold and standoffish.
Alan Watts
Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.
Alan Watts
We usually don't look. We overlook.
Alan Watts
Time is a social institution and not a physical reality. There is no such thing as time in the natural world - the world of stars and waters, clouds, mountains and living organisms. There is such a thing as rhythm - rhythm of tides, rhythm of biological processes... There is rhythm and there is motion. Time is a way of measuring motion.
Alan Watts
Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.
Alan Watts
There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it.
Alan Watts
A paradox is only a truth standing on its head to attract attention.
Alan Watts
...mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.
Alan Watts
There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.
Alan Watts
The psychotherapist ... tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to be in the world (of social convention) but not of the world.
Alan Watts
