Quote

The question is not what I should do in the future to get it, but rather, what am I presently doing that prevents me from realizing it right now?

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
Realizing
Rather
Future
Right
Presently
Prevents
Question

More quotes by Alan Watts

Image
You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.
Alan Watts
Image
But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies.
Alan Watts
Image
The real Zen of the old Chinese masters was wu-shih, or no fuss.
Alan Watts
Image
We tend to regard ourselves as puppets of the Past, driven along by something that is always behind us.
Alan Watts
Image
Black implies white self implies other
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 greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.
Alan Watts
Image
We have allowed brain thinking to develop and dominate our lives. As a consequence, we are at war within ourselves. The brain desiring things which the body does not want, and the body desiring things which the brain does not allow the brain giving directions which the body will not follow, and the body giving impulses which the brain cannot
Alan Watts
Image
But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
Alan Watts
Image
In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.
Alan Watts
Image
There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again.
Alan Watts
Image
Sex is no longer a serious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more about it than adults.
Alan Watts
Image
In life as well as in art Zen never wastes energy in stopping to explain it only indicates.
Alan Watts
Image
You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.
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
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
To remain caught up in ideas and words about Zen is, as the old masters say, to stink of Zen.
Alan Watts
Image
And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.
Alan Watts
Image
Basically, there is simply nothing to worry about, because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe.
Alan Watts
Image
We are the eyes of the cosmos. So that in a way, when you look deeply into somebody's eyes, you're looking deep into yourself, and the other person is looking deeply into the same self.
Alan Watts