Quote

Running away from fear is fear fighting pain is pain trying to be brave is being scared

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
Away
Trying
Scared
Brave
Fighting
Pain
Fear
Running

More quotes by Alan Watts

Image
So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.
Alan Watts
Image
This is what Zen means by being detached—not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.
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
I want ... to consort with people whose emotions are not ... cold and standoffish.
Alan Watts
Image
That's a waste of time. If you really understand Zen... you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because... the sound of the rain needs no translation.
Alan Watts
Image
But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
Alan Watts
Image
For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method.
Alan Watts
Image
There is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion.
Alan Watts
Image
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
Alan Watts
Image
If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid.
Alan Watts
Image
Altough we all realize that monotony is boring, almost every form of industrial work- banking, accounting, mass-producing, service- is monotonous, and most people are paid for simply putting up with monotony
Alan Watts
Image
A person who thinks too much only ever thinks about his thoughts
Alan Watts
Image
Time is a social institution and not a physical reality. There is no such thing as time in the natural world - the world of stars and waters, clouds, mountains and living organisms. There is such a thing as rhythm - rhythm of tides, rhythm of biological processes... There is rhythm and there is motion. Time is a way of measuring motion.
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
They are enlightened who join in this play knowing it as play, for people suffer only because they take as serious what the gods made for fun.
Alan Watts
Image
Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.
Alan Watts
Image
Where does my fist go when I open up my hand? Where does my lap go when I stand up?
Alan Watts
Image
You, yourself, are the eternal energy which appears as this Universe. You didn't come into this world you came out of it. Like a wave from the ocean.
Alan Watts
Image
Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
Alan Watts
Image
But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.
Alan Watts