Quote

A living body is not a fixed thing, but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool.

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
Living
Whirlpool
Body
Whirlpools
Thing
Flowing
Like
Flame
Flames
Event
Fixed
Events

More quotes by Alan Watts

Image
The destination of life is this eternal moment.
Alan Watts
Image
I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution , where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment... only to vanish forever.
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
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
Image
...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
Image
I was talking to a Zen master the other day and he said, You shall be my disciple.I looked at him and said, Who was Buddha's teacher? He looked at me in a very odd way for a moment and then he burst into laughter and handed me a piece of clover.
Alan Watts
Image
A chest of gold coins or a fat wallet of bills is of no use whatsoever to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft.
Alan Watts
Image
Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree.
Alan Watts
Image
Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment.
Alan Watts
Image
If you are ready to wake up, you are going to wake up. If you're not you are going to stay pretending that you are just a poor little me.
Alan Watts
Image
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
Image
There is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to get culture or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost.
Alan Watts
Image
The menu is not the meal.
Alan Watts
Image
Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
Alan Watts
Image
Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it.
Alan Watts
Image
...[W]ords can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.
Alan Watts
Image
If you belong to an in-group of good, or saved, or elite people, you can only know that you’re in because someone else is out. You cannot live on the right side of the tracks without there being a wrong side of the tracks, so you ought to be grateful to the outside for having the privilege of being on the inside.
Alan Watts
Image
Cows scream louder than carrots.
Alan Watts
Image
Thought is a means of concealing Truth.
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