Alan Watts Quotes About Inspiring
-
This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
→ -
The more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually killing what we love.
→ -
What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.
→ -
You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
→ -
Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.
→ -
Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree.
→ -
Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.
→ -
The menu is not the meal.
→ -
We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
→ -
Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.
→ -
Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time as much as patterns in space.
→ -
What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.
→ -
How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.
→ -
You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.
→ -
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.
→ -
Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
→ -
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.
→ -
But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.
→ -
We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.
→ -
Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.
→ -
Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal, for the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever.
→ -
Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith-in life, in other people, and in oneself-is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.
→ -
To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.
→ -
There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied.
→ -
The sense of wrong is simply failure to see where something fits into a pattern, to be confused as to the hierarchical level upon which an event belongs.
→ -
You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.
→ -
The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
→ -
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.
→ -
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
→ -
The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.
→