Alan Watts on Simplicity Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"If you cannot find it in yourself, where will you go for it?"

"Everything is just as it is."

"The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive."

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

"The menu is not the meal."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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