The Wisdom of Insecurity Quotes

“But 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.”
― 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. 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

“The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“to know truth one must get rid of knowledge,”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“the very violence of these political religions betrays the anxiety beneath them—for they are but men huddling together and shouting to give themselves courage in the dark.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“What is this? This is a rose. But “a rose” is a noise. What is a noise? A noise is an impact of air waves on the eardrum. Then a rose is an impact of air waves on the eardrum? No, a rose is a rose … is a rose is a rose is a rose.…”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“It seems that if I am afraid, then I am “stuck” with fear. But in fact I am chained to the fear only so long as I am trying to get away from it. On the other hand, when I do not try to get away I discover that there is nothing “stuck” or fixed about the reality of the moment. When I am aware of this feeling without naming it, without calling it “fear,” “bad,” “negative,” etc., it changes instantly into something else, and life moves freely ahead. The feeling no longer perpetuates itself by creating the feeler behind it.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“It seems that if I am afraid, then I am “stuck” with fear. But in fact I am chained to the fear only so long as I am trying to get away from it.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“There is just one process acting, and it does everything that happens. It raises my little finger and it creates earthquakes. Or, if you want to put it that way, I raise my little finger and also make earthquakes. No one fates and no one is being fated.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“He will not, like so many Western poets, turn philosopher and say that he is “one with” the flowers, the fence, the hills, and the birds. This, too, is gilding the lily, or, in his own Oriental idiom, “putting legs on a snake.” For when you really understand that you are what you see and know, you do not run around the countryside thinking, “I am all this.” There is simply “all this.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“For I am what I know; what I know is I. The sensation of a house across the street or of a star in outer space is no less I than an itch on the sole of my foot or an idea in my brain. In another sense, I am also what I do not know. I am not aware of my own brain as a brain. In just the same way, I am not aware of the house across the street as a thing apart from my sensation of it. I know my brain as thoughts and feelings, and I know the house as sensations. In the same way and sense that I do not know my own brain, or the house as a thing-in-itself, I do not know the private thoughts in your brain. But my brain, which is also I, your brain and the thoughts within it, as well as the house across the street, are all forms of an inextricably interwoven process called the real world. Conscious or unconscious of it as I may be, it is all I in the sense that the sun, the air, and human society are just as vital to me as my brain or my lungs. If, then, this brain is my brain—unaware of it as I am—the sun is my sun, the air my air, and society my society.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“In the light of these principles, how does the mind absorb suffering? It discovers that resistance and escape—the “I” process—is a false move. The pain is inescapable, and resistance as a defense only makes it worse; the whole system is jarred by the shock. Seeing the impossibility of this course, it must act according to its nature—remain stable and absorb.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“The human organism has the most wonderful powers of adaptation to both physical and psychological pain. But these can only come into full play when the pain is not being constantly restimulated by this inner effort to get away from it, to separate the “I” from the feeling. The effort creates a state of tension in which the pain thrives. But when the tension ceases, mind and body begin to absorb the pain as water reacts to a blow or cut.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“To be aware, then, is to be aware of thoughts, feelings, sensations, desires, and all other forms of experience. Never at any time are you aware of anything which is not experience, not a thought or feeling, but instead an experiencer, thinker, or feeler. If this is so, what makes us think that any such thing exists?”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“Animals spend much of their time dozing and idling pleasantly, but, because life is short, human beings must cram into the years the highest possible amount of consciousness, alertness, and chronic insomnia so as to be sure not to miss the last fragment of startling pleasure.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“You know the past only in the present and as part of the present.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“The desire to continue always can only seem attractive when one thinks of indefinite time rather than infinite time. It is one thing to have as much time as you want, but quite another to have time without end.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“long as the mind believes in the possibility of escape from what it is at this moment, there can be no freedom.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“he who would stand outside himself to kick himself, must then kick the self that stands outside. And so forever.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“community is its own moralist. It elects and pays judges, policemen, and preachers, as if to say, “When I am difficult, please kick me.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“It is a dance, and when you are dancing you are not intent on getting somewhere. You go round and round, but not under the illusion that you are pursuing something, or fleeing from the jaws of hell.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas, and words are “coins” for real things. They are not those things, and though they represent them, there are many ways in which they do not correspond at all. As with money and wealth, so with thoughts and things: ideas and words are more or less fixed, whereas real things change.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“Under the wide and starry sky Dig me a grave and let me lie; Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“This book, however, is in the spirit of the Chinese sage Lao-tzu, that master of the law of reversed effort, who declared that those who justify themselves do not convince, that to know truth one must get rid of knowledge, and that nothing is more powerful and creative than emptiness—from which men shrink. Here, then, my aim is to show—backwards-fashion—that those essential realities of religion and metaphysic are vindicated in doing without them, and manifested in being destroyed.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“It is written in the conviction that no theme could be more appropriate in a time when human life seems to be so peculiarly insecure and uncertain. It maintains that this insecurity is the result of trying to be secure, and that, contrariwise, salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“But he would do it in the strangest way, by declaring that there was no self to find. Lasting happiness—the underlying quest in almost all of Watts’s copious writing—can only be achieved by giving up the ego-self, which is a pure illusion anyway. The ego-self constantly pushes reality away. It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“we have, as it were, had our noses in the guidebook for most of our lives, and have never looked at the view. Whitehead’s criticism of traditional education is applicable to our whole way of living: We are too exclusively bookish in our scholastic routine.… 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

“To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“Memory never captures the essence, the present intensity, the concrete reality of an experience. It is, as it were, the corpse of an experience, from which the life has vanished.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

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