Alan Watts

“Wherever you go, you encounter yourself.”

“The art of living is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other.”

“Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present.”

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own.”

“You are the universe, you aren't IN the universe.”

“Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up.”

“The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.”

“To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing.”

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

“What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions.”

“Take dancing. As soon as we move, we have to learn the rhythm.”

“In music, the end is the music itself.”

“We do not 'come into' this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.”

“Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars.”

“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”

“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.”

“This is the other side of trying to be different. The other side of trying not to be different.”

“What I am really saying is that you don't need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomena of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water.”

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