Alan Watts

"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance."

"The more you own, the more it owns you."

"You are it. You are the universe expressing itself as a human for a little while."

"The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it."

"Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun."

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, we feel a responsibility for the actions of others."

"The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me."

"Do not resist this moment. So stop fighting with anything, including yourself."

"You didn't come into this world. You came out of it, like a leaf on a tree."

"Time is a straight line, and the present moment, which we speak of as 'now,' has no duration; it is only an abstraction."

"If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time."

"The self is not something fixed, given. It is constantly being created."

"But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far mountain hermitage and you think about how to help the world, you will never figure it out."

"The inexpressible thing is what is really important."

"The mind is like a musical instrument, and it needs constant tuning to maintain its harmony."

"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."

"The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions."

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."

"You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago."

"The problem with competition is that it takes away the requirement to make people psychologically present."

"When you finally awake, you will realize that everything is in you."

"Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it."

"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."

"I have realized that the past and future are real and only this moment is transitory."

"Everything you do in life is a consequence of your own thought."

"The universe is a self-created, self-governing, and self-perpetuating system."

"You can't live intelligently today unless you are willing to study the past."

"The more you try to be something, the more you're trying not to be something else."

"We live in a mythology of progress and improvement and development."

"Know that you are your own teacher. Looking outside yourself for a teacher is just another delusion."