Alan Watts’ revolutionary collection “This Is It” stands as one of the most influential philosophical works of the 20th century, bridging Eastern wisdom with Western understanding.

These Alan Watts “This Is It” quotes encapsulate his profound insights into the nature of existence, consciousness, and the eternal present moment.

His philosophy transcends conventional spiritual discourse, offering instead a refreshingly honest examination of what it means to be truly alive.

Alan Watts “This Is It” Quotes on Present Moment Awareness

Watts masterfully articulated the essence of living in the present moment, emphasizing that enlightenment isn’t a future achievement but a current recognition.

1. “This is it and I am it and you are it and so is that and he is it and she is it and it is it and that is that.”
2. “The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion.”
3. “What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.”
4. “The art of living is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique.”
5. “You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”
6. “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
7. “We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.”
8. “The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.”
9. “Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.”
10. “The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around, the real, deep down you is the whole universe.”

Alan Watts “This Is It” Quotes on the Nature of Reality

These quotes explore Watts’ fundamental understanding of reality as an interconnected, ever-changing dance of existence.

11. “Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.”
12. “The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.”
13. “Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”
14. “Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.”
15. “The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.”
16. “You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.”
17. “Faith is a state of openness or trust.”
18. “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
19. “Philosophy is man’s expression of curiosity about everything and his attempt to make sense of the world primarily through his intellect.”
20. “No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.”

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Alan Watts “This Is It” Quotes on Ego and Identity

Watts’ insights into the nature of the ego and our constructed sense of self reveal the illusory nature of separation.

21. “The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.”
22. “Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
23. “We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own.”
24. “Your everyday mind – that is the Way!”
25. “The sensation of ‘I’ as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selflessness without a radical shift of attention.”
26. “The individual may be understood as one particular focal point at which the whole universe expresses itself.”
27. “We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between a causally determined past and an absurdly uncertain future.”
28. “What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy.”
29. “The point is not to resist change, but to find the constant that underlies all change.”
30. “No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.”

Alan Watts “This Is It” Quotes on Eastern Philosophy and Zen

Drawing from his deep understanding of Eastern wisdom traditions, these quotes illuminate the essence of Zen philosophy.

31. “Buddhism has no real interest in divinity.”
32. “The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”
33. “Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”
34. “The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from a giant pine that lives for a thousand years.”
35. “In the Taoist view, the universe is not a machine but a living organism, not a collection of separate things but a single, undivided process.”
36. “The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to provide necessary goods and services, to enable humans to utilize and develop their faculties, and to enable humans to overcome their ego-centeredness by joining with others in a common task.”
37. “Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”
38. “The way of Chinese philosophy is to appreciate the mystery without trying to solve it.”
39. “In Zen, there is nothing to explain, nothing to teach, that will add to your knowledge.”
40. “The awakened person sees all things not as he is, but as they are.”

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Alan Watts “This Is It” Quotes on Suffering and Acceptance

These profound insights address the human condition of suffering and the path to genuine acceptance.

41. “Suffering is due to our disconnection with the inner soul. Meditation is establishing that connection.”
42. “The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing.”
43. “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
44. “Pain and pleasure go together; they are inseparable.”
45. “The more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually destroying what we think we value.”
46. “Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.”
47. “The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.”
48. “We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms.”
49. “To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown.”
50. “The art of living is more like navigation than warfare, for what is important is to understand the winds, the tides, the currents, the seasons, and the principles of growth and decay.”

Alan Watts “This Is It” Quotes on Freedom and Liberation

Watts’ understanding of true freedom transcends conventional notions of liberation, pointing to an inherent state of being.

51. “Freedom is not the absence of limitations and constraints but it is finding the right ones, those that fit our nature and liberate our potential.”
52. “A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion.”
53. “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
54. “Liberation is not a matter of place, but of realization.”
55. “You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.”
56. “The real discipline is not to resist what happens but to be aware of what is happening.”
57. “We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.”
58. “The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.”
59. “Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.”
60. “Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.”

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Alan Watts “This Is It” Quotes on Consciousness and Awareness

These quotes explore the fundamental nature of consciousness and the quality of pure awareness.

61. “Consciousness is a mirror that creates the appearance of the many in the one.”
62. “The startling truth is that our best efforts to help people are often our worst efforts to help people.”
63. “Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.”
64. “Awareness is not something we own; awareness is something we are.”
65. “The ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself.”
66. “What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.”
67. “Behind the apparent multiplicity of the world lies a single, undivided consciousness.”
68. “The self-conscious brain, like the self-conscious heart, is a disorder.”
69. “We are the eyes of the cosmos. So that in a way, when you look deeply into somebody’s eyes, you’re looking deep into yourself, and the other person is looking deeply into the same self.”
70. “Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.”

Alan Watts “This Is It” Quotes on Life and Death

Watts’ perspective on mortality reveals the profound interconnectedness of life and death as aspects of a single process.

71. “Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.”
72. “Life and death are not two opposed forces; they are simply two ways of looking at the same thing.”
73. “The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad.”
74. “We are not going into the future, it is coming to us.”
75. “Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.”
76. “Tomorrow never comes.”
77. “The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider Freeways, but narrower viewpoints.”
78. “Every manifestation of life is impermanent. Our human body appears and disappears like a wave on the ocean.”
79. “Death is simply a shedding of the physical body like the butterfly shedding its cocoon.”
80. “The meaning of life is that it ends.”

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Alan Watts “This Is It” Quotes on Wisdom and Understanding

These quotes reveal Watts’ profound insights into the nature of wisdom and the process of understanding.

81. “Wisdom is not something you get, it is something you are.”
82. “The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.”
83. “Understanding is not intellectual knowledge but a state of being.”
84. “The scholar learns something every day; the man of wisdom unlearns something every day.”
85. “You can’t get wet from the word water.”
86. “The menu is not the meal.”
87. “No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.”
88. “The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.”
89. “Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.”
90. “Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world.”

Alan Watts “This Is It” Quotes on Spiritual Experience

These final quotes encapsulate Watts’ understanding of authentic spiritual experience and awakening.

91. “Spiritual awakening is the difficult process whereby the increasing realisation that everything you’ve been taught and told and believed is essentially incorrect creates the realisation that there is no such thing as you as you’ve been taught to believe.”
92. “The religious idea of God cannot do duty for the metaphysical infinity.”
93. “Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.”
94. “At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but do not seem to make a problem of it.”
95. “Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out who you really are. In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy and you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in jail or in a nut house.”
96. “God is not the monarch of the world who issues commandments to subjects, but the inmost reality of the world expressing itself as the world.”
97. “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.”
98. “Heaven is not a place nor a condition. It is merely an awareness of perfect oneness.”
99. “The whole universe is our true body.”
100. “This is it. There are no greater realities to be experienced. This moment, this awareness, this very experience of being alive is the ultimate reality.”

Conclusion

These 100 Alan Watts “This Is It” quotes represent more than mere philosophical musings—they’re invitations to experience reality directly, without the filters of conceptual thinking.

Watts’ genius lay in his ability to translate complex Eastern wisdom into accessible language that resonates with Western minds struggling to find meaning in an increasingly complex world.

His “This Is It” philosophy reminds us that enlightenment isn’t a destination but a recognition of what’s already present, and the enduring power of his teachings lies in their elegant simplicity—pointing us back to the miraculous ordinariness of this very moment.