The meaning of happiness Quotes

“There is no greater freedom than the freedom to be what you are now.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“At each moment the mystic accepts the whole of his experience, including himself as he is, his circumstances as they are, and the relationship between them as it is. Wholeness is his keyword; his acceptance is total, and he excludes no part of his experience, however unsavory it may be.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“We see God every time we open our eyes; we inhale Him at every breath; we use His strength in every movement of our finger; we think Him in every thought, although we may not think of Him, and we taste Him in every bite of food.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“To put it in another way, at each moment we are what we experience, and there is no real possibility of being other than what we are. Wisdom therefore consists in accepting what we are, rather than in struggling fruitlessly to be something else, as if it were possible to run away from one’s own feet.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Meaning of Happiness: The Quest for Freedom of the Spirit in Modern Psychology and the Wisdom of the East

“Unaccepted, the universe has no meaning; it is senseless fate and chaos, but acceptance is a way of discovering meaning, not of manufacturing it.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“For God is the wholeness of life, which includes every possible aspect of man and is known in accepting the whole of our experience at each moment.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“For while scientist and logician dissect and analyze, the mystic looks for meaning in the whole.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“Man can never understand his freedom while he regards himself as the mere instrument of fate or while he limits his freedom to whatever he his ego can do to snatch from life the prizes which it desires. To be free man must see himself and life as a whole, not as active power and passive instrument but as two aspects of a single activity.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“Tao and Nirvana are only names for an experience; those who invented them had the experience first and gave it its name afterward, but now people are so busy learning about the names that they forget the experience.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“But God is always found where He is least expected, and no one would have thought of looking for Him in the cowshed of a country inn.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“The free man walks straight ahead; he has no hesitations and never looks behind, for he knows that there is nothing in the future and nothing in the past that can shake his freedom.
Freedom does not belong to him; it is no more his property than the wind, and as he does not possess it he is not possessed by it. And because he never looks behind his actions are said to leave no trace, like the passage of a bird through air.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“Zen concentrates on the importance of seeing into one's own nature now at this moment - not in five minutes when you have had time to "accept" yourself, nor ten years ahead when you have had time to retire to the mountains and meditate.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“Trying to explain Zen is like trying to catch wind in a box; the moment you the lid it ceases to be wind and in time becomes stagnant air.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“[W]u-wei means "nondoing" simply in the sense that by no action of our own can we bring ourselves into harmony with Tao, for [...] the secret of this harmony in the moment is not action but acceptance of a harmony already achieved by Tao itself. We do not alter the actual situation; but our attitude toward it undergoes a change whereby we feel harmony where before we felt discord.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“The whole situation in and around at this instant is a harmony with which you have to find your own union if you are able to be in accord with Tao. When you have discovered your own union with it, you will be in the state of Te, sometimes rendered as "virue" or "grace" or "power,' but best understood as Tao realized in man.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“The present situation within and around oneself is Tao, for the present moment is life. Our memory of the past is contained in it as well as the potentiality of the future.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“For man is always bound so long as he depends for his happiness on a partial experience; joy must always give way to sorrow, otherwise it can never be known as joy.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“[T]he wisdom of the East has a strictly practical aim which is not mere knowledge about the universe; it aims at a transformation of the individual and of his feeling for life through experience rather than belief. This experience is psychological or spiritual, not metaphysical, and except in certain specialized fields has no relation to occultism or to what we understand in the West as philosophy.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“[A]ny attempt to discover happiness is also an easy way to go crazy, and the world today is a crazy place just because people are trying to do it. We are a collection of people running wildly round in circles in frantic pursuit of our own selves, and the picture is not particularly edifying,
[...] It is like trying to mend a hole in one part of a handkerchief by taking a patch from another. For the trouble is that all our schemes, systems, and devices are partial.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“All men suffer [...], but not all are unhappy, for unhappiness is a reaction to suffering, not suffering itself.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“[T]he creations of man, his art, his literature, his buildings, differ only in quality, not in kind, from such creations of nature as birds, nests and honeycombs.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“[N]othing that is isolated can live, since the two most important characteristics of life are circulation and change.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“To hate death and change is trying to make life deathless and changeless, and this is rigid. moribund, living death”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“[L]ife and death are in conflict only in the mind which creates a war between them out of its own desires and fears. In fact life and death are not opposed but complementary, being the two essential factors of a greater life that is made up of living and dying just as melody is produced by the sounding and silencing of individual notes.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“[F]ire is not evil because it burns your fingers if you try to catch hold of it; it is only dangerous.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“The fact that happiness is associated with relaxation does not mean that it is impossible to be happy in the midst of strenuous effort, for to be truly effective great effort must, as it were, revolve upon a steady unmoving center. The problem before us is how to find such a center of relaxed balance and poise in man's individual life - a center whose happiness is unshaken by the whirl that goes on around it, which creates happiness because of itself and not because of external events, and this in spite of the fact that it may experience those events in all their aspects and extremes from the highest bliss to the deepest agony.”
― Alan W. Watts, The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology & the wisdom of the east

“Thus if man is to realize again his fundamental unity and harmony with life he must proceed by the roundabout way of trying to get that which he already has until he convinces himself of his own folly. For it is only by trying to accept life as a whole that we can make ourselves aware that there was never any real need to try, and that spirituality is in fact a matter of “becoming what we are.”
― Alan Watts, The Meaning of Happiness: The Quest for Freedom of the Spirit in Modern Psychology and the Wisdom of the East

“Those who search for happiness do not find it because they do not understand that the object of the search is the seeker.”
― Alan Watts, The Meaning of Happiness: The Quest for Freedom of the Spirit in Modern Psychology and the Wisdom of the East