Quote

To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.

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
Breath
Breaths
Kill
Therefore
Cling
Change
Persist
Trying
Resist
Life
Holding
Like
Resistance

More quotes by Alan Watts

Image
Enlightenment remains unrealized so long as it is considered as a specific state to be attained, and for which there are standards of success.
Alan Watts
Image
Any systems approaching perfect self-control also approaches perfect self-frustration.
Alan Watts
Image
When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.
Alan Watts
Image
I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek.
Alan Watts
Image
Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.
Alan Watts
Image
By going out of your mind, you come to your senses
Alan Watts
Image
Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
Alan Watts
Image
When one speaks of awakening, it means de-hypnotizatio n coming to your senses. But of course to do that, you have to go out of your mind.
Alan Watts
Image
There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it.
Alan Watts
Image
Lack of love for the vegetative, subtle, cthonic, pagan, and sexy aspect of the world means death.
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
A scholar tries to learn something everyday a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
Alan Watts
Image
One's life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If one is paranoid, the other is metanoid.
Alan Watts
Image
People sometimes fail to live because they are always preparing to live.
Alan Watts
Image
And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plowshares into swords
Alan Watts
Image
Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart.
Alan Watts
Image
Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up.
Alan Watts
Image
The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge. Just as a knife doesn't cut itself, fire doesn't burn itself, light doesn't illuminate itself. It's always an endless mystery to itself.
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
As the fish doesn't know water, people are ignorant of space. Consciousness is concerned only with changing and varying details it ignores constants-especially constant backgrounds. Thus only very exceptional people are aware of what is basic to everything.
Alan Watts