150 Best Alan Watts Quotes: Timeless Wisdom for Modern Life

Patrick WrightJuly 5, 2025

An oil painting of Alan Watts

150 Best Alan Watts Quotes: Timeless Wisdom for Modern Life

Introduction

Alan Watts (1915-1973) was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker who became one of the most influential interpreters of Eastern philosophy for Western audiences. Through his unique ability to bridge ancient wisdom with contemporary understanding, Watts introduced millions to Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and Hindu philosophy while maintaining a playful, accessible approach that resonated with seekers from all walks of life.

Known for his captivating lectures and profound insights into the nature of reality, consciousness, and the human condition, Watts authored over 25 books and recorded hundreds of talks that continue to inspire new generations. His philosophy emphasized the interconnectedness of all things, the illusion of the separate self, and the importance of living fully in the present moment.

This collection of 150 quotes represents the essence of Alan Watts's teachings, offering timeless wisdom on life, death, love, consciousness, and the art of being human. Each quote serves as a doorway into deeper understanding, inviting us to question our assumptions and discover the profound joy of existence.

Table of Contents

  1. The Nature of Reality and Consciousness
  2. Life, Death, and Existence
  3. Love, Relationships, and Connection
  4. Work, Money, and Success
  5. Wisdom and Understanding
  6. The Present Moment and Time
  7. Eastern Philosophy and Spirituality
  8. Self-Discovery and Personal Growth

Section 1: The Nature of Reality and Consciousness

Alan Watts had a remarkable ability to explain the most profound aspects of reality in ways that were both intellectually satisfying and deeply intuitive. His insights into consciousness reveal the fundamental unity underlying all existence.

"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." - Alan Watts

"You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean." - Alan Watts

"You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself." - Alan Watts

"Reality in itself is neither permanent nor impermanent; it cannot be categorized. But when one tries to hold on to it, change is everywhere apparent, since, like one's own shadow, the faster one pursues it, the faster it flees." - Alan Watts

"The menu is not the meal." - Alan Watts

"Discord on one level is harmony on another." - Alan Watts

"Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together." - Alan Watts

"We do not 'come into' this world, we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean 'waves', as the universe 'peoples'. Every individual is an expression of the realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe." - Alan Watts

"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. You are not a stranger here." - Alan Watts

"Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe." - Alan Watts

"The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity." - Alan Watts

"To notice is to select, to regard some bits of perception, or some features of the world, as more noteworthy, more significant, than others. To these we attend, and the rest we ignore—for which reason conscious attention is at the same time ignorance despite the fact that it gives us a vividly clear picture of whatever we choose to notice." - Alan Watts

"My conscious mind must have its roots and origins in the most unfathomable depths of being, yet it feels as if it lived all by itself in this tight little skull." - Alan Watts

"Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations." - Alan Watts

"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance." - Alan Watts

"We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain." - Alan Watts

"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." - Alan Watts

"Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence." - Alan Watts

"What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously." - Alan Watts

Section 2: Life, Death, and Existence

Watts approached the subjects of life and death with remarkable clarity, helping us understand our existence as part of an eternal cosmic dance rather than a brief, isolated event.

"And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light. I return in every baby born." - Alan Watts

"I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time, a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment, only to vanish forever." - Alan Watts

"Existence is basically a kind of dancing or music--an immensely complex energy pattern which needs no explanation other than itself--just as we do not ask what is the meaning of fugues by Bach or sonatas by Mozart." - Alan Watts

"We do not dance to reach a certain point on the floor, but simply to dance." - Alan Watts

"Carried to its final extreme, the logical end of this type of reaction to life is suicide. The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead." - Alan Watts

"Camus said there is only really one serious philosophical question, which is whether or not to commit suicide. I think there are four or five serious philosophical questions: The first one is: Who started it? The second is: Are we going to make it? The third is: Where are we going to put it? The fourth is: Who's going to clean up? And the fifth: Is it serious?" - Alan Watts

"It is interesting that Hindus, when they speak of the creation of the universe do not call it the work of God, they call it the play of God, the Vishnu lila, lila meaning play. And they look upon the whole manifestation of all the universes as a play, as a sport, as a kind of dance." - Alan Watts

"A banquet hall deserted, after the revelry, all the guests have left and gone their ways. And the table, with overturned glasses, crumbled napkins, bread crumbs, dirty knives and forks, lies empty. And the laughter echoes only in one's mind… And then the echo goes, the memory, the traces are all gone." - Alan Watts

"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." - Alan Watts

"Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal." - Alan Watts

"The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless." - Alan Watts

"Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified." - Alan Watts

"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." - Alan Watts

"Life and death are not two opposed forces; they are simply two ways of looking at the same force, for the movement of life is also the movement of death." - Alan Watts

"What we call 'I' is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale." - Alan Watts

"Birth and death are not two different states, but they are different aspects of the same state." - Alan Watts

"The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible." - Alan Watts

"Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present." - Alan Watts

Section 3: Love, Relationships, and Connection

Watts understood love as a fundamental force of the universe, expressing itself through countless forms and teaching us about our deep interconnection with all beings.

"The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion." - Alan Watts

"The essential point is to consider love as a spectrum. There is not, as it were, just nice love and nasty love, spiritual love and material love, mature affection on the one hand and infatuation on the other. These are all forms of the same energy." - Alan Watts

"Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command." - Alan Watts

"Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated." - Alan Watts

"When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of … Nothing is left but to love." - Alan Watts

"Love is not something that is a sort of rare commodity, everybody has it." - Alan Watts

"Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself." - Alan Watts

"The first thing to discover is what indeed you do love, and you will find there is something." - Alan Watts

"When you really feel love, you feel the eternity of it. It doesn't seem as if it has a beginning or an end." - Alan Watts

"To love is to discover what is loveable in someone." - Alan Watts

"The art of love... is largely the art of persistence." - Alan Watts

"Love is the organizing and unifying principle which makes the world a universe and the disintegrated mass a community." - Alan Watts

"In love, as in everything else, we are always trying to clutch what is essentially unclutchable." - Alan Watts

"The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing." - Alan Watts

"Real love is when you love someone for what they are, not for what you think they ought to be." - Alan Watts

"The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention." - Alan Watts

"Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world." - Alan Watts

"We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future." - Alan Watts

"No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle." - Alan Watts

Section 4: Work, Money, and Success

Watts challenged conventional notions of success and encouraged us to find work that feels like play, understanding that true wealth comes from living authentically.

"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 things you don't like doing, which is stupid." - Alan Watts

"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." - Alan Watts

"Money alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy." - Alan Watts

"To succeed is always to fail-in the sense that the more one succeeds in anything, the greater is the need to go on succeeding. To eat is to survive to be hungry." - Alan Watts

"The measuring of worth and success in the terms of time, and the insistent demand for assurances of a promising future, make it impossible to live freely both in the present and in the 'promising' future when it arrives." - Alan Watts

"What would you do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?" - Alan Watts

"The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath." - Alan Watts

"The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present." - Alan Watts

"You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago." - Alan Watts

"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth." - Alan Watts

"The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other." - Alan Watts

"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." - Alan Watts

"It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played." - Alan Watts

"Education, in the real sense, is not preparation for life, it is actually living." - Alan Watts

"The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination." - Alan Watts

"But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be." - Alan Watts

"If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed." - Alan Watts

"The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance." - Alan Watts

Section 5: Wisdom and Understanding

Watts's wisdom came from his ability to see through conventional thinking and help others discover deeper truths about themselves and reality.

"Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone." - Alan Watts

"As muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone, it could be argued that those who sit quietly and do nothing are making one of the best possible contributions to a world in turmoil." - Alan Watts

"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." - Alan Watts

"Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know." - Alan Watts

"Action without wisdom, without clear awareness of the world as it really is, can never improve anything." - Alan Watts

"If we are open only to discoveries which will accord with what we know already, we may as well stay shut." - Alan Watts

"People become concerned with being more humble than other people." - Alan Watts

"The knowledge of the past stays with us. To let go is simply to release any images and emotions." - Alan Watts

"It is both dangerous and absurd for our world to be a group of communions mutually excommunicate." - Alan Watts

"And remember, that it takes as long, to view it or, to listen to it, as it does to do it." - Alan Watts

"Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun." - Alan Watts

"Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way." - Alan Watts

"A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily." - Alan Watts

"The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there." - Alan Watts

"Philosophy is man's expression of curiosity about everything and his attempt to make sense of the world primarily through his intellect." - Alan Watts

"Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick." - Alan Watts

"In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way." - Alan Watts

"Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it's just doing it." - Alan Watts

Section 6: The Present Moment and Time

One of Watts's central teachings was the importance of living fully in the present moment, understanding that the past and future exist only as mental constructs.

"The past and the future, are in the present." - Alan Watts

"For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere." - Alan Watts

"If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are 'crying for the moon.' We have no such assurance." - Alan Watts

"I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is." - Alan Watts

"The future is a concept, it doesn't exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is always now." - Alan Watts

"This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now." - Alan Watts

"We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time." - Alan Watts

"Tomorrow never comes." - Alan Watts

"There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied." - Alan Watts

"The present is the only time that any of us have to be alive - to know anything - to perceive - to learn - to act - to change - to heal." - Alan Watts

"No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now." - Alan Watts

"Time is a social institution and not a physical reality. There is no such thing as time in the natural world." - Alan Watts

"The wake doesn't drive the ship." - Alan Watts

"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." - Alan Watts

"Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence." - Alan Watts

"The point of dancing is the dance." - Alan Watts

"Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be." - Alan Watts

"To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, 'I am listening to this music,' you are not listening." - Alan Watts

"Things are not explained by the past. They are explained by what happens now." - Alan Watts

Section 7: Eastern Philosophy and Spirituality

As a bridge between East and West, Watts made ancient wisdom accessible to modern minds, showing how Eastern philosophy offers practical insights for contemporary life.

"To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas." - Alan Watts

"Taoism is a way of liberation, which never comes by means of revolution, since it is notorious that most revolutions establish worse tyrannies than they destroy." - Alan Watts

"To Taoism that which is absolutely still or absolutely perfect is absolutely dead, for without the possibility of growth and change there can be no Tao." - Alan Watts

"Omul perfect își folosește mintea ca pe o oglindă. Nu apucă nimic; nu refuză nimic. Primește, dar nu păstrează." - Alan Watts

"Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes." - Alan Watts

"In Zen, nothing is good, nothing is bad. It is a way of being free from the dualistic thinking that traps us." - Alan Watts

"Buddhism is not saying that the self does not exist; it is saying that the self is not what you think it is." - Alan Watts

"The basic problem is to understand that there are no such things as things; that is to say separate things, separate events." - Alan Watts

"In the Bhagavad-Gita, we are told to act, but not to be attached to the fruits of action." - Alan Watts

"The highest to which man can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content; nothing higher can it give him, and nothing further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit." - Alan Watts

"The Tao is a certain kind of order, and this kind of order is not quite what we call order when we arrange everything geometrically in boxes, or in rows." - Alan Watts

"When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us." - Alan Watts

"Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment." - Alan Watts

"The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity." - Alan Watts

"In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean." - Alan Watts

"The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge. Just as a knife doesn't cut itself, fire doesn't burn itself, light doesn't illuminate itself." - Alan Watts

"Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is." - Alan Watts

"The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens." - Alan Watts

Section 8: Self-Discovery and Personal Growth

Watts encouraged deep self-inquiry while reminding us that the journey of self-discovery often leads to the realization that there is no separate self to discover.

"...behind the scene, under the surface of reality, you are all actors, marvelously skilled at playing parts and in getting lost in the mazes of your own minds and the entanglements of your own affairs, as if this were the most urgent thing going on." - Alan Watts

"You're under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago." - Alan Watts

"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth." - Alan Watts

"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance." - Alan Watts

"To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float." - Alan Watts

"You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes." - Alan Watts

"We do not 'come into' this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree." - Alan Watts

"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." - Alan Watts

"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." - Alan Watts

"So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself." - Alan Watts

"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." - Alan Watts

"We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain." - Alan Watts

"Your body does not eliminate poisons by knowing their names. To try to control fear or depression or boredom by calling them names is to resort to superstition of trust in curses and invocations." - Alan Watts

"If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything." - Alan Watts

"Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they'll say you're crazy and you're blasphemous, and they'll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, 'My goodness, I've just discovered that I'm God,' they'll laugh and say, 'Oh, congratulations, at last you found out.'" - Alan Watts

"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." - Alan Watts

"The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe." - Alan Watts

"Faith is a state of openness or trust." - Alan Watts

"No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them." - Alan Watts

Conclusion

An oil painting of Alan Watts

Alan Watts's legacy continues to resonate with seekers, philosophers, and anyone yearning for a deeper understanding of life's mysteries. His unique ability to translate Eastern wisdom into Western language, combined with his playful approach to the most serious questions, has made his work timeless and universally relevant.

These 150 quotes represent just a fraction of Watts's profound insights, yet they capture the essence of his philosophy: that we are not separate from the universe but integral expressions of it, that life is meant to be lived fully in the present moment, and that the deepest truths are often the simplest ones we've overlooked.

In an age of increasing complexity and disconnection, Watts's message remains refreshingly clear: we are already whole, already perfect, already home. The journey is not about becoming something we're not, but about recognizing what we've always been. His words continue to invite us into a dance with existence itself, reminding us that the point of the dance is not to arrive somewhere, but simply to dance.

As we reflect on these quotes, may we find not just intellectual understanding but a lived experience of the truths they point toward. For as Alan Watts himself would remind us, the menu is not the meal, and these words are merely fingers pointing at the moon of our own awakening.

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