Alan Watts on Depression Quotes

"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. You cannot make yourself love."

"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."

"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."

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

"No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity to live now."

"The reason you want to be better is the reason you aren’t."

"The quickness of the mind is often its own undoing; it tries to jump over the present to a better future."

"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."

"We do not come into this world; we come out of it, just as leaves come out of a tree. We are an expression of the environment, not separate from it."

"The sense of 'I' is like the feeling of a tight shoe. When the shoe is gone, the foot is there, but the feeling of the shoe is not."

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

"Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe."

"If you're always trying to be happy, you will never be happy."

"But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is."

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

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

"To hold your breath is to lose it. If you want to keep life, you must let it go. Clutching at security only makes you more insecure."

"The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because you begin to be anxious about the fact that you might suffer."

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

"You don't look at a flower and say it's wrong. You look at it and say it's a flower. Why do you look at yourself and say you're wrong?"

"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."

"The source of all light is in the eye."

"The more you want to get out of your depression, the more you are in it. Because your wanting to get out is the depression."

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

"Resistance to change is the root of suffering."

"There is no such thing as a separate person. We are all 'it'."

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

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

"Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present."

"If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself."

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

"Memories and future expectations are only real when they are being experienced in the present moment."