Alan Watts on Strength Quotes

"You don't look at the musician and say, 'What are you trying to prove?' He's just playing."

"A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something everyday."

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

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

"Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal."

"If you want to get the knot out, you must first look at the way the string is tangled."

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

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

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

"Life is a matter of being able to separate the essential from the nonessential."

"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 real secret of life is to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now."

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

"Resistance to change is the root of all suffering."

"Everything that happens, happens as much because of you as because of the rest of the world."

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

"To hold your breath is to lose your breath."

"The willow which yields to the weight of snow is the one whose branches do not break."

"The menu is not the meal."

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

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

"The ego is largely a social fiction. It is a mask we wear so tightly that we forget the face beneath it is the cosmos itself."

"We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time."

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

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

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

"Zen is a liberation from the dualistic thinking that creates the false sense of a separate ego."

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

"To go with the grain of things is the secret of the strength of the universe."

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

"Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, and mummy-dead."

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

"Trying to capture the future for security is a trap. The only reality is the present moment; clutching at certainty only creates the anxiety you wish to avoid."