Quote

We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.

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
Permanence
Consciousness
Fact
Desire
War
Facts
Nature
Ourself
Flux

More quotes by 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
Religion is always falling apart.
Alan Watts
Image
Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.
Alan Watts
Image
Conscious attention is a designed function of the brain which scans the environment for any trouble making changes. If you identify yourself with your trouble shooter, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety.
Alan Watts
Image
There is a deep, peaceful calm in the dawning of a new day.
Alan Watts
Image
The psychotherapist ... tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to be in the world (of social convention) but not of the world.
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
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
What we need to realize is that there can be, shall we say, a movement, a stirring among people, which can be organically designed instead of politically designed.
Alan Watts
Image
What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are coins for real thing
Alan Watts
Image
Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.
Alan Watts
Image
Everything is perpetually becoming new.
Alan Watts
Image
The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from a giant pine that lives for a thousand years.
Alan Watts
Image
But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is. If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death - or shall I say, death implies life - you can conceive yourself.
Alan Watts
Image
Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.
Alan Watts
Image
The future is a concept, it doesn't exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is always now. That's one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now.
Alan Watts
Image
I want ... to consort with people whose emotions are not ... cold and standoffish.
Alan Watts
Image
Don't hurry anything. Don't worry about the future. Don't worry about what progress you're making. Just be entirely content to be aware of what is.
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
Self-improvement is a dangerous form of vanity.
Alan Watts