Quote

Any systems approaching perfect self-control also approaches perfect self-frustration.

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
Frustration
Systems
Approach
Control
Perfect
Also
Self
Approaching
Approaches

More quotes by Alan Watts

Image
What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.
Alan Watts
Image
We all need to go out of our minds at least once a day. When we go out of our minds we quickly come to our senses.
Alan Watts
Image
But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.
Alan Watts
Image
If we are not totally blind, what we are seeking is already here. This is it.
Alan Watts
Image
The Highest to which people can attain is wonder and if the prime phenomenon makes them wonder, let them be content nothing higher can it give them, and nothing further should they seek for behind it there is the limit.
Alan Watts
Image
Buddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent...this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering.
Alan Watts
Image
But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
Alan Watts
Image
A person who thinks too much only ever thinks about his thoughts
Alan Watts
Image
Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.
Alan Watts
Image
Where-so-ever beings exist throughout all galaxies, it doesn't make any difference - you are all of them....and when they come into being, that's you coming into being.
Alan Watts
Image
Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.
Alan Watts
Image
Western religions are more concerned with behavior, doctrine, and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and our world.
Alan Watts
Image
You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.
Alan Watts
Image
The wake doesn't drive the ship
Alan Watts
Image
Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.
Alan Watts
Image
Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.
Alan Watts
Image
No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
Alan Watts
Image
It is interesting that Hindus, when they speak of the creation of the universe do not call it the work of God, they call it the play of God, the Vishnu lila, lila meaning play. And they look upon the whole manifestation of all the universes as a play, as a sport, as a kind of dance — lila perhaps being somewhat related to our word lilt
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
The individual may be understood as one particular focal point at which the whole universe expresses itself - as an incarnation of the self, or of the Godhead, or whatever one may choose to call it.
Alan Watts