Quote

Life and love generate effort but effort will not generate them.

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
Generate
Effort
Love
Life

More quotes by Alan Watts

Image
Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.
Alan Watts
Image
We have a strange anxiety in us that if we don't interfere then it won't happen. Now that's the root of an enormous amount of trouble.
Alan Watts
Image
In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.
Alan Watts
Image
Every explicit duality is an implicit unity.
Alan Watts
Image
When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be.
Alan Watts
Image
Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
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
You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it.
Alan Watts
Image
Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
Alan Watts
Image
If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.
Alan Watts
Image
To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.
Alan Watts
Image
If a flower had a God it would not be a transcendental flower but a field.
Alan Watts
Image
I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
Alan Watts
Image
If you insist on being determined by the past that's your game, but the fact of the matter is it all starts right now.
Alan Watts
Image
Philosophers, for example, often fail to recognize that their remarks about the universe apply also to themselves and their remarks. If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so.
Alan Watts
Image
When death comes, it's just like winter. We don't say, There ought not to be winter. That the winter season, when the leaves fall and the snow comes, is some kind of defeat, something which we should hold out against. No. Winter is part of the natural course of events. No winter, no summer. No cold, no heat.
Alan Watts
Image
A holy person is someone who is whole who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites.
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
Everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality.
Alan Watts
Image
Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world — a place where they are one.
Alan Watts