212 Quotes by Alan W. Watts

As a matter of fact, our age is no more insecure than any other. Poverty, disease, war, change, and death are nothing new. In the best of times “security” has never been more than temporary and apparent. But it has been possible to make the insecurity of human life supportable by belief in unchanging things beyond the reach of calamity – in God, in man’s immortal soul, and in the government of the universe by eternal laws of right.

Tools such as these, as well as the tools of language and thought, are of real use to men only if they are awake – not lost in the dreamland of past and future, but in the closest touch with that point of experience where reality can alone be discovered: this moment.

We suffer from the delusion that the entire universe is held in order by the categories of human thought, fearing that if we do not hold to them with the utmost tenacity, everything will vanish into chaos.

However, when you say to yourself, “I must go on living,” you put yourself in a double bind because you submit to a process which is essentially spontaneous and then insist it must happen.

At such times we are so aware of the moment that no attempt is made to compare its experience with other experiences.