Alan Watts

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.

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

Join the dance.

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.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

The problem is that for women, the average time is just over 14 minutes… men are left with about 12 minutes during which time they need to think of something to do!

There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.

The most interesting information come from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.

Something magical has happened to me: like a dream when one feels frightened and creepy, and suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that no such terrors exist. I have wakened up.

Just because you like my stuff doesn’t mean I owe you anything.

Much depends on people knowing what opportunity means; it doesn’t mean a silver platter, it oftener means a spade. Self-help means something sterner than ‘help yourself’–reach over and take it.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

Do you realize that you can’t play the game of life with sweaty palms?

You are the daydream I am supposed to have for the rest of my life.

When you doubt the brilliance of your shine, I will take you through my darkness. I will show you where you shine the brightest.

People who consistently win have a clear and thoughtful strategy. They know what they need to do and when they need to do it. They write it down so they stay on course, and avoid any alternative that does not get them closer to the finish line.

It’s terribly unfair that we should have to suffer like this.