Alan Watts Quotes

Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying.

We are as we are. How can you claim to know what life I was meant to lead, let alone threaten to force me into it? All your quibbling is nonsense. As well forbid your nose to snuff, or your ears to hear. We are as we do.

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.

Individual consciousness is just sickness.

There's a problem which is when you're trapped in your own identity and everything is really you, then you feel less freedom to sort of explore who you want to be. So I think it's kind of something we're stuck with as long as humans are the way we are.

I think a lot of snowflakes are alike...and I think a lot of people are alike too.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living... The wave moves onward but the particles of which it is composed do not... It cannot be but that at intervals throughout society there are real men intermixed . . . as the carpenter puts one iron bar in his bannister for every five or six wooden ones.

We should know mankind better if we were not so anxious to resemble one another.

No man knows himself as an original.

If you think all men are created equal, you haven't seen Bo Diddley in the shower.

Some people do have a very innate sexuality to them. I may or may not have it, but it makes people see you in a certain light that has nothing to do with me.

We all can be only who we are, no more, no less.

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?

Ultimately you can't repress individuality, even though you can try.

You are not wood, you are not stones, but men.

It's a human instinct to be known.

Be thou what thou singly art and personate only thyself. Swim smoothly in the stream of thy nature and live but one man.

Except that a human being is both the public and the private. We are both, private and public in the same person.

He said when the Lord made people He made them all the same for starters. But life marks people. If you know the way, you can read them like maps.

To be is to do - Socrates To do is to be - Sartre Do Be Do Be Do - Sinatra

We use concepts like "consciousness"---"mind"---"personality," but we don't really know yet what these things are.' He was shaking his head. 'Not really. Not at all.

Love is sweet, dearest Ned, but it cannot change a man's nature. -- Lyanna