Quote

To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening.

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
Listening
Listen
Understand
Music
Must
Long
Thinking

More quotes by Alan Watts

Image
And the more you become aware of the unknown self - if you become aware of it - the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is.
Alan Watts
Image
Life and love generate effort but effort will not generate them.
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
When you really understand that you are what you see and know, you do not run around the countryside thinking, I am all this! There is simply all this.
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
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
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
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
Image
Man is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock ball that revolves about a small star at the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy. ... I am absolutely amazed to discover myself on this rock ball rotating around a spherical fire. It's a very odd situation. And the more I look at things I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird.
Alan Watts
Image
You're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe...
Alan Watts
Image
A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.
Alan Watts
Image
The trouble with many religions, accused of wishful thinking, is that they are not wishful enough. They show a deplorable lack of imagination.
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
In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.
Alan Watts
Image
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.
Alan Watts
Image
For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method.
Alan Watts
Image
We usually don't look. We overlook.
Alan Watts
Image
We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
Alan Watts
Image
Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
Alan Watts
Image
Faith...is letting go and trusting oneself to the unknown.
Alan Watts