Alan Watts

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.

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.

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.

The art of living… is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.

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.

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.

When you embark for strange places don’t leave any of yourself safely at the shore… Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory.

If only I had known then the speed with which she could die, maybe I wouldn’t have become the hemlock.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

They (wives) are people who think when the telephone bell rings, it is against the law not to answer it

One of the hardest things for a parent to have to do is to tell your children that your other parent has died.

We want to reproduce all those instruments which were prepared and used in America once upon a time.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet.

Our life before moving to Washington was filled with simple joys. Saturdays at soccer games, Sundays at Grandma’s house. And a date night for Barack and me was either dinner or a movie, because as an exhausted mom, I couldn’t stay awake for both. He was still the guy who’d picked me up for our dates in a car that was so rusted out, I could actually see the pavement going by through a hole in the passenger-side door.

Life’s three best teachers: heartbreak, empty pocket, failures.

When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

I can visualize the time when almost every family will have a small plane in their back yard.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!