The Wisdom of Insecurity Quotes

“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 there is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self-love all the bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“But you will cease to feel isolated when you recognize, for example, that you do not have a sensation of the sky: you are that sensation. For all purposes of feeling, your sensation of the sky is the sky, and there is no “you” apart from what you sense, feel, and know. This is why the mystics and many of the poets give frequent utterance to the feeling that they are “one with the All,” or “united with God,” or, as Sir Edwin Arnold expressed it— Foregoing self, the universe grows I.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“The faster things move in circles, the sooner they become indistinguishable blurs. It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about “I.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“I am sure, however, that the body dies because it wants to. It finds it beyond its power to resist the disease or to mend the injury, and so, tired out with the struggle, turns to death.”
― 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.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“Almost more common is the sensitive boy who learns in school to encrust himself for life in the shell of the “tough-guy” attitude. As an adult he plays, in self-defense, the role of the Philistine, to whom all intellectual and emotional culture is womanish and “sissy.” Carried to its final extreme, the logical end of this type of reaction to life is suicide. The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“If we are to have intense pleasures, we must also be liable to intense pains. The pleasure we love, and the pain we hate, but it seems impossible to have the former without the latter. Indeed, it looks as if the two must in some way alternate, for continuous pleasure is a stimulus that must either pall or be increased. And the increase will either harden the sense buds with its friction, or turn into pain. A consistent diet of rich food either destroys the appetite or makes one sick.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“To keep up this “standard” most of us are willing to put up with lives that consist largely in doing jobs that are a bore, earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure. These intervals are supposed to be the real living, the real purpose served by the necessary evil of work. Or we imagine that the justification of such work is the rearing of a family to go on doing the same kind of thing, in order to rear another family … and so ad infinitum.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“There is, then, the feeling that we live in a time of unusual insecurity. In the past hundred years so many long-established traditions have broken down—traditions of family and social life, of government, of the economic order, and of religious belief. As the years go by, there seem to be fewer and fewer rocks to which we can hold, fewer things which we can regard as absolutely right and true, and fixed for all time.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“If we must be nationalists and have a sovereign state, we cannot also expect to have world peace. If we want to get everything at the lowest possible cost, we cannot expect to get the best possible quality, the balance between the two being mediocrity. If we make it an ideal to be morally superior, we cannot at the same time avoid self-righteousness. If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“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

“Obviously, we try to know, name, and define fear in order to make it "objective," that is, separate from "I." But why are we trying to be separate from fear? Because we are afraid. In other words, fear is trying to separate itself from fear, as if one could fight fire with fire.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“The frightened or lonely person begins at once to think, "I'm afraid," or, "I'm lonely." This is, of course, an attempt to avoid the experience. We don't want to be aware of this present. But as we cannot get out of the present, our only escape is into memories. Here we feel on safe ground, for the past is the fixed and the known -- but also, of course, the dead.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“At such times we are so aware of the moment that no attempt is made to compare its experience with other experiences.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“Understanding comes through awareness. Can we, then, approach our experience -- our sensations, feelings, and thoughts -- quite simply, as if we had never known them before, and, without prejudice, look at what's going on?”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“If we can really understand what we're looking for -- that safety is isolation, and what we do to ourselves when we look for it -- we shall see that we do not want it at all.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“When someone says, “Time to stop now!” he is in a panic because he has had nothing to eat yet, and wants more and more time to go on eating money, ever hopeful of satisfaction around the corner. We”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“The Dhammapada, a collection of sayings of the Buddha, begins: “All that we are is the result of what we have thought. It is founded on our thoughts; it is made up of our thoughts.” This is, in effect, the same statement that opens St. John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.… All things were made by him (the Word), and without him was not anything made that was made.” By thoughts, or mental words, we distinguish or “make” things. Without thoughts, there are no “things”; there is just undefined reality.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“[T]he function of the brain is to serve the present and the real, not to send man chasing wildly after the phantom of the future.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“Matter is spirit named.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“To define means to fix, and, when you get down to it, real life isn't fixed.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“Here is a person who knows that in two weeks' time he has to undergo a surgical operation. In the meantime he is feeling no physical pain; he has plenty to eat; he is surrounded by friends and human affection; he is doing work that is normally of great interest to him. But his power to enjoy these things is taken away by constant dread. He is insensitive to the immediate realities around him. His mind is preoccupied with something that is not yet here. It is not as if he were thinking about it in a practical way, trying to decide whether he should have the operation or not, or making plans to take care of his family and his affair if he should die. These decisions have already been made. Rathre, he is thinking about the operation in an entirely futile way, which both ruins his present enjoyment of life an dcontributes nothing to the solution of any problem. But he cannot help himself.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“It is quite another thing to see that you are your “fate,” and that there is no one either to master it or to be mastered, to rule or to surrender.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“We do not really want continuity, but rather a present experience of total happiness.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“the mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“We can hardly begin to consider this problem unless it is clear that the craving for security is itself a pain and a contradiction, and that the more we pursue it, the more painful it becomes. This is true in whatever form security may be conceived. You want to be happy, to forget yourself, and yet the more you try to forget yourself, the more you remember the self you want to forget. 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. You want peace of mind, but the attempt to pacify it is like trying to calm the waves with a flat-iron.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“We can hardly begin to consider this problem unless it is clear that the craving for security is itself a pain and a contradiction, and that the more we pursue it, the more painful it becomes.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“The miracles of technology cause us to live in a hectic, clockwork world that does violence to human biology,”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“The point, then, is that when we try to understand the present by comparing it with memories, we do not understand it as deeply as when we are aware of it without comparison.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity