Alan Watts Quotes

“When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of… Nothing is left but to love.”
― Alan Watts

“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 illusions.”
― Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy

“In a relativistic universe you don't cling to anything, you learn to swim. And you know what swimming is - it's kind of a relaxed attitude with the water. In which you don't keep yourself afloat by holding the water, but by a certain giving to it.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Essential Alan Watts

“Evil” read backwards is “live.” Demon est deus inversus.”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter?

“Kindly let me help you or you will drown said the monkey putting the fish safely up a tree.”
― Alan W. Watts

“The knowledge of the past stays with us. To let go is simply to release any images and emotions.”
― Alan Watts

“‪A wise man once said, 'Life is like breathing. If you try to hold it, you'll lose it. But let it come & go & you'll always be connected to it.'‬”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones

“But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.”
― Alan Watts

“I feel cut off only because I am split within myself, because I try to be divided from my own feelings and sensations. What I feel and sense therefore seems foreign to me. And on being aware of the unreality of this division, the universe does not seem foreign any more.

For I am what I know; what I know is I. The sensation of a house across the street or of a star in outer space is no less I than an itch on the sole of my foot or an idea in my brain.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“Birdle Burble


I went out of mind and then came to my senses

By meeting a magpie who mixed up his tenses,

Who muddled distinctions of nouns and of verbs,

And insisted that logic is bad for the birds.

With a poo-wee cluck and a chit, chit-chit;

The grammar and meaning don't matter a bit.



The stars in their courses have no destination;

The train of events will arrive at no station;

The inmost and ultimate Self of us all

Is dancing on nothing and having a ball.

So with a chat for chit and with tat for tit,

This will be that, and that will be It!

(poem for James Broughton)”
― Alan Watts

“In Zen Buddhist texts they say, “You cannot nail a peg into the sky.” And so, to be a man of the sky, a man of the void, is also called ‘a man not depending on anything’. And when you’re not hung on anything you are the only thing that isn’t hung on anything – which is the universe. Which doesn’t hang, you see. Where would it hang? It has no place to fall on, even though it may be dropping; there will never be the crash of it landing on a concrete floor somewhere. But the reason for that is that it won’t crash below because it doesn’t hang above. And so there is a poem, in Chinese, which speaks of such a person as having above, not a tile to cover the head; below, not an inch of ground on which to stand.”
― Alan W. Watts, Out of Your Mind

“Step back a few billion kilometers from the Earth, then see yourself, as that tiny dot. And realize that that tiny spot has little effect on the Universe. When you realize that, you can step off.”
― Robert Black

“For Kerouac, the embodiment of American Zen was Gary Snyder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Buddhist poet and essayist, who he fictionalized as Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums. Snyder was a practicing Buddhist and a translator of classic Chinese texts before Kerouac met him. He was the Zen guru of the Beats at the same time that Alan Watts popularized Buddhism for middle-class Americans in best-selling books and magazine articles of the late 1950s. Snyder had studied with Watts for a while but thought him 'square.' 'He was cool in relation to the people around him,' Snyder once said, referring to 'middle class, needy' Americans, but he was 'never actually cool.' Then Snyder added with a wink, '[and] you know what I mean, as the Big Bopper says,' invoking the rock-and-roll classic 'Chantilly Lace' for those hip and in-the-know.”
― Joel Dinerstein, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America

“Alan Watts was the first male to give me goosebumps. I got him from the first minute I listened to him, like he was the remaining missing piece in my own jigsaw puzzle. And I always come back to him. And no matter how much I listen to him, he always gives me goosebumps.”
― Jack Freestone