Alan Watts
Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to beCollection: Letting Go
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.Collection: Life
By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us.Collection: Mind Blowing
No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.Collection: Differences
Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.Collection: Degrees
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 a causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality.Collection: Memories
You are the universe experiencing itself.Collection: Eye Opening
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. That's one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now.Collection: Thinking
People sometimes fail to live because they are always preparing to live.Collection: People
By going out of your mind, you come to your sensesCollection: Mind
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?Collection: Realizing
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.Collection: Buddhist
All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head.Collection: How You Feel
The sound of the rain needs no translation.Collection: Rain
Running away from fear is fear; fighting pain is pain; trying to be brave is being scaredCollection: Running
Don't hurry anything. Don't worry about the future. Don't worry about what progress you're making. Just be entirely content to be aware of what is.Collection: Future
To go out of your mind once a day is tremendously important, because by going out of your mind you come to your senses. And if you stay in your mind all of the time, you are over rational, in other words you are like a very rigid bridge which because it has no give; no craziness in it, is going to be blown down by the first hurricane.Collection: Bridges
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.Collection: Inspiring
A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with Reality, and lives in a world of illusion.Collection: Wisdom
We see what we believe rather than what we see.Collection: Believe
Nothing is more creative than death, since it has the whole secret of life. It means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that 'I' cannot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. When a man knows this, he lives for the first time in his life. By holding his breath, he loses it. By letting go he finds it.Collection: Letting Go
Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.Collection: Goal
We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a seperate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body-a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange.Collection: People
For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method.Collection: Overcoming
To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely with this universe. You feel profoundly rooted in it and connected with it. You feel, in other words, that the whole energy, which expresses itself in the galaxies, is intimate. It is not something to which you are a stranger, but it is that with which you, whatever it is, are intimately bound up. That in your seeing, your hearing, your talking, your thinking, your moving, you express that which it is that moves the sun and other stars.Collection: Stars
There is a peculiar contradiction in trying to be a member of a republic while believing that the universe is a monarchy.Collection: Believe
There is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to "get culture" or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost.Collection: Mind
If you belong to an in-group of good, or saved, or elite people, you can only know that you’re in because someone else is out. You cannot live on the right side of the tracks without there being a wrong side of the tracks, so you ought to be grateful to the outside for having the privilege of being on the inside.Collection: Grateful
The problem comes up because we ask the question in the wrong way. We supposed that solids were one thing and space quite another, or just nothing whatever. Then it appeared that space was no mere nothing, because solids couldn't do without it. But the mistake in the beginning was to think of solids and space as two different things, instead of as two aspects of the same thing. The point is that they are different but inseparable, like the front end and the rear end of a cat. Cut them apart, and the cat dies.Collection: Inspiring
If we want justice for minorities and cooled wars with our natural enemies, whether human or non-human, we must first come to terms with the minority and the enemy in ourselves and in our own hearts, for the rascal is there as much as anywhere in the "external" world - -especially when you realize that the world outside your skin is as much yourself as the world inside.Collection: Motivational
Increasingly, we're developing all kinds of systems for verifying reality by echoing it.Collection: Reality
The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance. Like music also, it is fulfilled in each moment of its course. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meaning of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.Collection: Spiritual
What is the next step, the practical application? —I will answer that the absolutely vital thing is to consolidate your understanding, to become capable of enjoyment, of living in the present, and of the discipline which this involves. Without this you have nothing to give.Collection: Discipline
The hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests.Collection: Ego
What are plants doing? What are plants all about? They serve human beings by being decorative, but what is it from its own point of view? It's using up air; it's using up energy. It's really not doing anything except being ornamental. And yet here's this whole vegetable world, cactus plants, trees, roses, tulips, and edible vegetables, like cabbages, celery, lettuce - they're all doing this dance.Collection: Life
It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odduncanny and highly improbable. G.K.Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don't. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things.Collection: Spiritual
The best way to convince someone is by making him realize that what you speak came from his own mind.Collection: Mind
The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from a giant pine that lives for a thousand years.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Sick
There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.Collection: Men
So we down-to-earth, gutsy, tough, realistic, and practical types have just been squandering billions of dollars and unimaginable amounts of energy, nerve-work, and materials in whizzing off to the moon to discover, as astronomers knew before, that it was just a dreary slag heap. This is the true, original and scientifically etymological meaning of being lunatics. Crying for the moon.Collection: Sunset
Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars.Collection: Stars
You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.Collection: Inspiring
How could you say the best form of government is a republic if you think the universe is a monarchy?Collection: Thinking
If you love a person, you say to that person, "Look, I love you, whatever that may be. I've seen quite a bit of it and I know there's lots that I haven't seen, but still it's you and I want you to be what you want to be. And I won't be happy if I've got you in a cage. You'd be a bird without song."Collection: Love
The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Thinking
The biggest ego trip is getting rid of your ego, and of course the joke of it all is that your ego does not exist.Collection: Ego
For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.Collection: Ifs