Alan Watts

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

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

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

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

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.

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.

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 menu is not the meal.

You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.

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

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.

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.