Alan Watts on Simplicity Quotes

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

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

"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."

"We do not come into this world from the outside; we come out of it, like leaves growing from a tree. We are an expression of the environment, not an intruder."

"When we attempt to exercise power over others, we cannot avoid giving them power over us."

"If you are ready to wake up, you are going to wake up, and if you are not ready you are going to stay asleep."

"There is no point in making plans for a future which you will not be able to enjoy because you are not living in the present."

"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."

"The menu is not the meal."

"No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen."

"Peace can be made only by those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love."

"Everything is just as it is."

"The more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love."

"Life is a musical phenomenon. Its only point is itself."

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

"To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead."

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

"You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you."

"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."

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

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

"The physical world is wiggly. Clouds are wiggly, waters are wiggly, mountains are wiggly, trees are wiggly. And we are wiggly."

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

"The world is precisely the relationship between the observer and the observed."

"Our pleasure is always a memory of the past or an expectation of the future."

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

"One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious."

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

"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-importantly causative past and an absorbingly important future."

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

"The practice of Zen is eating when you are hungry and sleeping when you are tired."

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

"To truly understand the world, you cannot try to capture it in a net of rigid definitions. You must swim with it, letting go of the shore to float."