Quote

The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

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
Abstraction
Concrete
Future
Reality
Past
Without
Abstractions

More quotes by Alan Watts

Image
The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events--that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies--and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends.
Alan Watts
Image
We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
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
The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is
Alan Watts
Image
Nothing fails like success—because the self-imposed task of our society and all its members is a contradiction: to force things to happen which are acceptable only when they happen without force.
Alan Watts
Image
Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.
Alan Watts
Image
The real you is not a puppet that life pushes around, the real deep down you is the whole universe.
Alan Watts
Image
It's so important to consider this question: What do I desire?
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
The animal tends to eat with his stomach, and the man with his brain. When the animal's stomach is full, he stops eating, but the man is never sure when to stop. When he has eaten as much as his belly can take, he still feels empty, he still feels an urge for further gratification.
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
Faith...is letting go and trusting oneself to the unknown.
Alan Watts
Image
Different Chinese philosophers, writing probably in 5-4 centuries B.C., presented some major ideas and a way of life that are nowadays known under the name of Taoism, the way of correspondence between man and the tendency or the course of natural world.
Alan Watts
Image
When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there...You're looking at you.
Alan Watts
Image
Just as the ocean is waving so each one of us is a waving of the whole cosmos, the entire works, all there is.
Alan Watts
Image
We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.
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
There is no coming toward it or going away from it it is, and you are it.
Alan Watts
Image
And so when the essential idea of love is lost there comes talk of fidelity. Actually, the only possible basis for two beings, male and female, to relate to each other is to grant each other total freedom.
Alan Watts
Image
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
Alan Watts