Alan Watts

To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it. It is to be able to use it as an instrument instead of being used by it.

Alan Watts

To define means to fix, and, when you get down to it, real life isn’t fixed.

Alan Watts

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.

Alan Watts

To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.

Alan Watts

To practice with an end in view is to have one eye on the practice and the other on the end, which is lack of concentration, lack of sincerity.

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts

Trying to pretend to oneself that a life of constant self frustration was in fact a great spiritual attainment.

Alan Watts

Wars based on principle are far more destructive… the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.

Alan Watts

We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.

Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts