The Wisdom of Insecurity Quotes

“Logic, intelligence, and reason are satisfied, but the heart goes hungry.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“Like words, memories never really succeed in “catching” reality.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“This kind of living in the fantasy of expectation rather than the reality of the present is the special trouble of those business men who live entirely to make money. So many people of wealth understand much more about making and saving money than about using and enjoying it. They fail to live because they are always preparing to live. Instead of earning a living they are mostly earning an earning, and thus when the time comes to relax they are unable to do so. Many a “successful” man is bored and miserable when he retires, and returns to his work only to prevent a younger man from taking his place.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“It is in vain that doctors prolong life if we spend the extra time being anxious to live still longer. It is in vain that engineers devise faster and easier means of travel if the new sights that we see are merely sorted and understood in terms of old prejudices. It is in vain that we get the power of the atom if we are just to continue in the rut of blowing people up.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“To "know" reality you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, and feel it.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“We suffer from the delusion that the entire universe is held in order by the categories of human thought, fearing that if we do not hold to them with the utmost tenacity, everything will vanish into chaos. We”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“When each moment becomes an expectation life is deprived of fulfillment, and death is dreaded for it seems that here expectation must come to an end.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“Indeed, the power of words has gone to man’s head in more than one way. To define has come to mean almost the same thing as to understand.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“… 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.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“Sorrow can only be compared with the memory of joy, which is not at all the same thing as joy itself. Like words, memories never really succeed in "catching" reality.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“In the widest sense of the word, to name is to interpret experience by the past, to translate it into terms of memory, to bind the unknown into the system of the known. Civilized man knows of hardly any other way of understanding things. Everybody, everything, has to have its label, its number, certificate, registration, classification. What is not classified is irregular, unpredictable, and dangerous. Without passport, birth certificate, or membership in some nation, one’s existence is not recognized.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“It is simply being aware of this present experience, and realizing that you can neither define it nor divide yourself from it. There is no rule but “Look!”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“The capacity of the brain to forsee the future has much to do with the fear of death.
For when the body is worn out and the brain is tired, the whole organism welcomes death. But it is difficult to understand how death can be welcome when you are young and strong, so that you come to regard it as a dread and terrible event. For the brain, in its immaterial way, looks into the future and conceives it a good to go on and on and on forever—not realizing that its own material would at last find the process intolerably tiresome. Not taking this into account, the brain fails to see that, being itself material and subject to change, its desires will change, and a time will come when death will be good. On a bright morning, after a good night’s rest, you do not want to go to sleep. But after a hard day’s work the sensation of dropping into unconsciousness is extraordinarily pleasant.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“Consequently our age is one of frustration, anxiety, agitation, and addiction to “dope.” Somehow we must grab what we can while we can, and drown out the realization that the whole thing is futile and meaningless. This “dope” we call our high standard of living, a violent and complex stimulation of the senses, which makes them progressively less sensitive and thus in need of yet more violent stimulation. We crave distraction—a panorama of sights, sounds, thrills, and titillations into which as much as possible must be crowded in the shortest possible time. To”
― Alan W. Watts, Wisdom Of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“Working rightly, the brain is the highest form of "instinctual wisdom." Thus it should work like the homing instinct of pigeons and the formation of the foetus in the womb - without verbalizing the process of knowing "how" it does it. The self-conscious brain, like the self-conscious heart, is a disorder, and manifests itself in the acute feeling of separation between "I" and my experience.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“Nothing is really more inhuman than human relations based on morals. When a man gives bread in order to be charitable, lives with a woman in order to be faithful, eats with a Negro in order to be unprejudiced, and refuses to kill in order to be peaceful, he is as cold as a clam. He does not actually see the other person. Only a little less chilly is the benevolence springing from pity, which acts to remove suffering because it finds the sight of it disgusting. But”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“We look for this security by fortifying and enclosing ourselves in innumerable ways. We want the protection of being “exclusive” and “special,” seeking to belong to the safest church, the best nation, the highest class, the right set, and the “nice” people. These defenses lead to divisions between us, and so to more insecurity demanding more defenses. Of course it is all done in the sincere belief that we are trying to do the right things and live in the best way; but this, too, is a contradiction.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“Perhaps the most exasperating thing about “me,” about nature and the universe, is that it will never “stay put.” It is like a beautiful woman who will never be caught, and whose very flightiness is her charm. For the perishability and changefulness of the world is part and parcel of its liveliness and loveliness.”
― Alan W. Watts, Wisdom Of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“In the Garden of Eden Adam saw the animals before he named them: in the traditional system, children named the animals before they saw them.1”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“is in vain that doctors prolong life if we spend the extra time being anxious to live still longer.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“To define means to fix, and, when you get down to it, real life isn’t fixed.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“Ye suffer from yourselves, none else compels,    None other holds you that ye live and die And whir upon the wheel, and hug and kiss      its spokes of agony,    Its tire of tears, its nave of nothingness. Discovering this the mind becomes whole: the split between I and me, man and the world, the ideal and the real, comes to an end. Paranoia, the mind beside itself, becomes metanoia, the mind with itself and so free from itself. Free from clutching at themselves the hands can handle; free from looking after themselves the eyes can see; free from trying to understand itself thought can think. In such feeling, seeing, and thinking life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself. In this moment it is finished.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“Death is the unknown in which all of us lived before birth.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“I am depressed, and want to get “I” out of this depression. The opposite of depression is elation, but because depression is not elation, I cannot force myself to be elated. I can, however, get drunk. This makes me wonderfully elated, and so when the next depression arrives, I have a quick cure. The subsequent depressions have a way of getting deeper and blacker, because I am not digesting the depressed state and eliminating its poisons. So I need to get even drunker to drown them. Very soon I begin to hate myself for getting so drunk, which makes me still more depressed—and so it goes.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening. To understand joy or fear, you must be wholly and undividedly aware of it. So long as you are calling it names and saying, “I am happy,” or “I am afraid,” you are not being aware of it. Fear, pain, sorrow, and boredom must remain problems if we do not understand them, but understanding requires a single and undivided mind. This, surely, is the meaning of that strange saying, “If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the “I” out of the experience. We pretend that we are amoebas, and try to protect ourselves from life by splitting in two. Sanity, wholeness, and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate “I” or mind can be found.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“Human desire tends to be insatiable. We are so anxious for pleasure that we can never get enough of it. We stimulate our sense organs until they become insensitive, so that if pleasure is to continue they must have stronger and stronger stimulants. In self-defense the body gets ill from the strain, but the brain wants to go on and on. The brain is in pursuit of happiness, and because the brain is much more concerned about the future than the present, it conceives happiness as the guarantee of an indefinitely long future of pleasures. Yet the brain also knows that it does not have an indefinitely long future, so that, to be happy, it must try to crowd all the pleasures of Paradise and eternity into the span of a few years.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“I may not, perhaps, be forgiven for introducing sober matters with a frivolous notion, but the problem of making sense out of the seeming chaos of experience reminds me of my childish desire to send someone a parcel of water in the mail. The recipient unties the string, releasing the deluge in his lap. But the game would never work, since it is irritatingly impossible to wrap and tie a pound of water in a paper package. There are kinds of paper which won’t disintegrate when wet, but the trouble is to get the water itself into any manageable shape, and to tie the string without bursting the bundle.

The more one studies attempted solutions to problems in politics and economics, in art, philosophy, and religion, the more one has the impression of extremely gifted people wearing out their ingenuity at the impossible and futile task of trying to get the water of life into neat and permanent packages.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety