Alan Watts on Strength Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other."

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

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

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

"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."

"Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies."

"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 menu is not the meal."

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

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