Alan Watts Overthinking Quotes

No tags found.

Sarah Khan

Who was Alan Watts?

Alan Watts, a prolific author, and the speaker was among the first to translate Eastern knowledge for a Western audience. He found the adjacent Buddhist Lodge at an early age, having been born outside of London in 1915. Alan immigrated to the United States in 1938 and briefly served as an Episcopal priest before relocating to Millbrook, New York, where he penned his seminal book The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Anxious Age. In 1951, he relocated to San Francisco and began teaching Buddhist studies. In 1956, he launched his successful radio show, “Way Beyond the West.” Alan’s radio sermons were broadcast nationwide by the early 1960s, and the counterculture movement accepted him as a spiritual ambassador. He wrote and traveled frequently until his death in 1973. This article has some Alan Watts overthinking quote

Alan Watts’s Top Quotes to help with Overthinking

Alan Watts is often regarded as the most authoritative translator of Eastern disciplines for the modern West. He possessed an amazing and inexplicable ability to write the unwritable.

Among his many abilities as an orator and writer, he had a unique ability to explain complicated ideas in the form of simple and illustrated ideas. The straightforward manner in which he exhibited and communicated all of his thoughts made him a global philosopher, someone who the great majority of people could understand. Let’s take a look at some of Alan Watts’ magical and enlightening remarks. Here are some Alan Watts overthinking quote:

  1. Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
  2. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain
  3. Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal, for the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever….
  4. Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone
  5. There will always be suffering. But we must not suffer over the suffering
  6. 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
  7. The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
  8. But I’ll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything
  9. The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless
  10. Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations
  11. When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was.
  12. There is always something taboo, something repressed, un-admitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one’s eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion.
  13. o valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now. I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
  14. No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle
  15. This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play
  16. We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree
  17. Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree
  18. Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified
  19. Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up… now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep
  20. Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything
  21. Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything
  22. …tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live
  23. To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it
  24. Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way
  25. Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time
  26. 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.

The Evolve app is now live globally on Android & Apple, click here to try it for free! The app has incredible journeys that will help you combat the demon of overthinking.

Here are some more popular reads amongst quote lovers: