Quote

Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.

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
Miserable
Spent
Short
Full
Better
Long
Way
Life

More quotes by Alan Watts

Image
Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had.
Alan Watts
Image
To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely one with this universe.
Alan Watts
Image
Running away from fear is fear fighting pain is pain trying to be brave is being scared
Alan Watts
Image
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.
Alan Watts
Image
...the habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism: to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns.
Alan Watts
Image
Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
Alan Watts
Image
Although profoundly inconsequential, the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied it lends an unmistakable quality to the work.
Alan Watts
Image
We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.
Alan Watts
Image
To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end.
Alan Watts
Image
The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
Alan Watts
Image
If you insist on being determined by the past that's your game, but the fact of the matter is it all starts right now.
Alan Watts
Image
We know that from time to time there arise among human beings people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.
Alan Watts
Image
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
Image
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.
Alan Watts
Image
More and more we try to effect an adaptation to life by means of external gadgets, and attempt to solve our problems by conscious thinking rather than unconscious 'know-how'. This is much less to our advantage than we like to suppose.
Alan Watts
Image
To perceive that form reveals the void, and to see that the void reveals form, is the secret for the overcoming of death. To the extent that one is unaware of space, one is unaware of one's own eternity — it's the same thing!
Alan Watts
Image
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
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
If the earth is man's extended body, to be loved and respected as one's own body, those who do no greening of themselves will hardly bring about the greening of America. The idea of 'greening' involves color, flowering, freshness of spring, and, above all, respect for what is organic and vegetative as distinct from the mechanical and metallic.
Alan Watts
Image
And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plowshares into swords
Alan Watts