Quote

Change is an illusion because we're always at the place where any future can take us.

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
Always
Illusion
Future
Place
Change
Take

More quotes by Alan Watts

Image
So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.
Alan Watts
Image
If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.
Alan Watts
Image
We must be careful that the business we build does not become mere busyness.
Alan Watts
Image
We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.
Alan Watts
Image
No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.
Alan Watts
Image
The problem is to overcome the ingrained disbelief in the power of winning nature by love, in the gentle (ju) way (do) of turning with the skid, of controlling ourselves by cooperating with ourselves.
Alan Watts
Image
The point is seeing that THIS - the immediate, everyday and present experience - is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe. I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter.
Alan Watts
Image
What are we saying when we say now, something is holy? That means you should take a different attitude to what you are doing than if you were, for example, doing it for kicks.
Alan Watts
Image
More and more we try to effect an adaptation to life by means of external gadgets, and attempt to solve our problems by conscious thinking rather than unconscious 'know-how'. This is much less to our advantage than we like to suppose.
Alan Watts
Image
What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.
Alan Watts
Image
Lack of love for the vegetative, subtle, cthonic, pagan, and sexy aspect of the world means death.
Alan Watts
Image
Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.
Alan Watts
Image
Man is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock ball that revolves about a small star at the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy. ... I am absolutely amazed to discover myself on this rock ball rotating around a spherical fire. It's a very odd situation. And the more I look at things I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird.
Alan Watts
Image
Our view of reality is like a chart of the sea - the truer it is, the less likely we will become lost.
Alan Watts
Image
Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.
Alan Watts
Image
A living body is not a fixed thing, but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool.
Alan Watts
Image
We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.
Alan Watts
Image
To feel that life is meaningless unless “I” can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch.
Alan Watts
Image
For a decision-the freest of my actions just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.
Alan Watts
Image
The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance. Like music also, it is fulfilled in each moment of its course. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meaning of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.
Alan Watts