Quote

If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.

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
Expected
Wisp
Depends
Eludes
Happiness
Wisps
Future
Elude
Death
Vanish
Ever
Abyss
Something
Chasing
Always
Grasp

More quotes by Alan Watts

Image
In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.
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
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
Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.
Alan Watts
Image
But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.
Alan Watts
Image
The biggest ego trip is getting rid of your ego, and of course the joke of it all is that your ego does not exist.
Alan Watts
Image
Courage is the goal of cowards.
Alan Watts
Image
No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.
Alan Watts
Image
And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.
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
Society is our extended mind and body.
Alan Watts
Image
For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase—oddly enough—to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization.
Alan Watts
Image
Think about a piece of music - some great symphony - we don't expect it to get better as it develops, or that its whole purpose is to reach the final crescendo. The joy is found in listening to the music in each moment.
Alan Watts
Image
The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.
Alan Watts
Image
The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.
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
Thought is a means of concealing Truth.
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
Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap.
Alan Watts
Image
... preliminary accounting, banking and surveying (known as arithmetic, algebra and geometry).
Alan Watts