Alan Watts

Everything is perpetually becoming new.

When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.

Perhaps there is no other knowing than the mere competence of the act. If at the heart of one's being, there is no self to which one ought to be true, then sincerity is simply nerve; it lies in the unabashed vigor of the pretense. But pretense is only pretense when it is assumed that the act is not true to the agent. Find the agent.

If you can't meditate in a boiler room, you can't meditate.

You must not be afraid of playing wrong notes. Just forget it, play it wrong! But play!

You can't live at all unless you can live fully now.

The real you is not a puppet that life pushes around, the real deep down you is the whole universe.

The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.

The harder we try to catch hold of the moment, to seize a pleasant sensation..., the more elusive it becomes... It is like trying to clutch water in one's hands - the harder one grips, the faster it slips through one's fingers.

Of course, you can’t force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flatiron. Water becomes clear and calm only when left alone.

Basically, there is simply nothing to worry about, because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe.

We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.

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

When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing but things.

What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.

There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again.

To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.

The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.

If you love a person, you say to that person, "Look, I love you, whatever that may be. I've seen quite a bit of it and I know there's lots that I haven't seen, but still it's you and I want you to be what you want to be. And I won't be happy if I've got you in a cage. You'd be a bird without song."

People sometimes fail to live because they are always preparing to live.

You can't have something without nothing.