The Wisdom of Insecurity Quotes

“man seems to be unable to live without myth, without the belief that the routine and drudgery, the pain and fear of this life have some meaning and goal in the future.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run. The same is true of life and of God.”
― Alan W. Watts, Wisdom Of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“backwards law.” When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“As a matter of fact, our age is no more insecure than any other. Poverty, disease, war, change, and death are nothing new. In the best of times “security” has never been more than temporary and apparent. But it has been possible to make the insecurity of human life supportable by belief in unchanging things beyond the reach of calamity—in God, in man’s immortal soul, and in the government of the universe by eternal laws of right.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“Tools such as these, as well as the tools of language and thought, are of real use to men only if they are awake -- not lost in the dreamland of past and future, but in the closest touch with that point of experience where reality can alone be discovered: this moment.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“What we know by memory, we know only at secondhand.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“There is another story of a Chinese sage who was asked, "How shall we escape the heat?" -- meaning, of course, the heat of suffering. He answered, "Go right into the middle of the fire." "But how, then, shall we escape the scorching flame?" "No further pain will trouble you!" We do not need to go as far as China. The same idea comes in The Divine Comedy, where Dante and Virgin find that the way out of Hell lies at its very center.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“You want to escape from pain, but the more you struggle to escape, the more you inflame the agony. You are afraid and want to be brave, but the effort to be brave is fear trying to run away from itself.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“The divided mind comes to the dinner table and pecks at one dish after another, rushing on without digesting anything to find one better than the last. It finds nothing good, because there is nothing which it really tastes.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“Thus the “brainy” economy designed to produce this happiness is a fantastic vicious circle which must either manufacture more and more pleasures or collapse—providing a constant titillation of the ears, eyes, and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost inescapable noise and visual distractions. The perfect “subject” for the aims of this economy is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio, preferably using the portable kind which can go with him at all hours and in all places. His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm-with-out-release through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies, and other sensuous surfaces, interspersed with such restorers of sensitivity—shock treatments—as “human interest” shots of criminals, mangled bodies, wrecked airplanes, prize fights, and burning buildings.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“To understand this is to realize that life is entirely momentary, that there is neither permanence nor security, and that there is no “I” which can be protected.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead, This is why all the affairs of civilization are rushed, why hardly anyone enjoys what he has, and is forever seeking more and more. Happiness, then, will consist, not of solid and substantial realities, but of such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes, and assurances.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money. Money gets rid of the inconveniences of barter. But it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth, because it will do you no good to eat it or wear it for clothing. Money is more or less static, for gold, silver, strong paper, or a bank balance can “stay put” for a long time. But real wealth, such as food, is perishable. Thus a community may possess all the gold in the world, but if it does not farm its crops it will starve.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings the past and the future are not as real, but more real than the present. The present cannot be lived happily unless the past has been “cleared up” and the future is bright with promise.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“By itself, a tree is meaningless, but it is the meaning of the word “tree.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“For most of us, the other half of sanity lies simply in seeing and enjoying the unknown, just as we can enjoy music without knowing either how it is written or how the body hears it.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“For when we fail to see that our life is change, we set ourselves against ourselves and become like Ouroboros, the misguided snake, who tries to eat his own tail. Ouroboros is the perennial symbol of all vicious circles, of every attempt to split our being asunder and make one part conquer the other.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“As a consequence, we are at war within ourselves—the brain desiring things which the body does not want, and the body desiring things which the brain does not allow; the brain giving directions which the body will not follow, and the body giving impulses which the brain cannot understand. In”
― Alan W. Watts, Wisdom Of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“The natural world gives us many examples of the great effectiveness of this way. The Chinese philosophy of which judo itself is an expression—Taoism—drew attention to the power of water to overcome all obstacles by its gentleness and pliability. It showed how the supple willow survives the tough pine in a snowstorm, for whereas the unyielding branches of the pine accumulate snow until they crack, the springy boughs of the willow bend under its weight, drop the snow, and jump back again. If, when swimming, you are caught in a strong current, it is fatal to resist. You must swim with it and gradually edge to the side. One who falls from a height with stiff limbs will break them, but if he relaxes like a cat he will fall safely. A building without 'give' in its structure will easily collapse in storm or earthquake, and a car without the cushioning of tires and springs will soon come apart on the road. The mind has just the same powers, for it has give and can absorb shocks like water or a cushion. But this giving way to an opposing force is not at all the same thing as running away. A body of water does not run away when you push it; it simply gives at the point of the push and encloses your hand. A shock absorber does not fall down like a bowling-pin when struck; it gives, and yet stays in the same place. To run away is the only defense of something rigid against an overwhelming force. Therefore the good shock absorber has not only 'give,' but also stability or 'weight.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“Already man uses innumerable gadgets to displace the work done by bodily organs in the animals, and it would surely be in line with this tendency to externalize the reasoning functions of the brain--and thus hand over the government of life to electromagnetic monsters. In other words, the interests and goals of rationality are not those of man as a whole organism. If we are to live for the future, and to make the chief work of the mind prediction and calculation, man must eventually become a parasitic appendage to a mass of clockwork.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“we can only believe in what we have already known, preconceived, and imagined. But this is beyond any imagination.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“If living is to end in pain, incompleteness, and nothingness, it seems a cruel and futile experience for beings who are born to reason, hope, create, and love.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves. This”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“fear is born of duality—”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run. The same is true of life and of God.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“On the one hand there is myself, and on the other the rest of the universe. I am not rooted in the earth like a tree. I rattle around independently. I seem to be the center of everything, and yet cut off and alone.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“This experience which we call things, colors, sounds, smells, tastes, forms, and weights is, in itself, no thing, no form, no number, no nothing—but at this moment we behold it. We are, then, beholding the God which traditional doctrines call the boundless, formless, infinite, eternal, undivided, unmoved, and unchanging Reality—the Absolute behind the relative, the Meaning behind thoughts and words.1 Naturally the Meaning is meaning-less because, unlike words, it does not have meaning but is meaning.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“Plucking chrysanthemums along the East fence; Gazing in silence at the southern hills; The birds flying home in pairs Through the soft mountain air of dusk— In these things there is a deep meaning, But when we are about to express it, We suddenly forget the words.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart. The movement in which I am a pattern or convolution began incalculable ages before the (conventionally isolated) event called birth, and will continue long after the event called death. Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.”
― Alan W. Watts, Wisdom Of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety