Quote

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.

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
Simple
Obvious
Around
Inspiring
Overachieving
Great
Necessary
Obviousness
Something
Meaning
Plainness
Life
Beyond
Rushes
Achieve
Panic
Alive
Plain
Everybody
Simplicity

More quotes by Alan Watts

Image
There's an interdependence between flowers and bees. Where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees, there are no flowers. They are really one organism. And so in the same way, everything in nature depends on everything else.
Alan Watts
Image
Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap.
Alan Watts
Image
We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
Alan Watts
Image
The style of God venerated in church, mosque, and synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.
Alan Watts
Image
Black implies white self implies other
Alan Watts
Image
Thought is a means of concealing Truth.
Alan Watts
Image
Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars.
Alan Watts
Image
When death comes, it's just like winter. We don't say, There ought not to be winter. That the winter season, when the leaves fall and the snow comes, is some kind of defeat, something which we should hold out against. No. Winter is part of the natural course of events. No winter, no summer. No cold, no heat.
Alan Watts
Image
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
Alan Watts
Image
We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.
Alan Watts
Image
The real you is not a puppet that life pushes around, the real deep down you is the whole universe.
Alan Watts
Image
In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.
Alan Watts
Image
For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase—oddly enough—to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization.
Alan Watts
Image
All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head.
Alan Watts
Image
As the fish doesn't know water, people are ignorant of space. Consciousness is concerned only with changing and varying details it ignores constants-especially constant backgrounds. Thus only very exceptional people are aware of what is basic to everything.
Alan Watts
Image
The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens.
Alan Watts
Image
When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
Alan Watts
Image
Philosophers, for example, often fail to recognize that their remarks about the universe apply also to themselves and their remarks. If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so.
Alan Watts
Image
A person who thinks too much only ever thinks about his thoughts
Alan Watts
Image
Self-improvement is a dangerous form of vanity.
Alan Watts