Alan Watts on Depression Quotes

"Resistance to change is the root of suffering."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot make yourself love."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it."

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

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

"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 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 source of all light is in the eye."

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

"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."

"Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone."

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

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

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