Alan Watts Quotes

If your mind is anything like mine, it can stumble through a half-dozen different thoughts in a heartbeat.

My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them──by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents.

If little else, the brain is an educational toy. Why it may be a frustrating play thing - one whose finer points recede just when you think you are mastering them - it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently surprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled. [...] Alas! the brain is a toy that plays games of its own. Its very most favorite game is the one-thing-leads-to-another game.

My mind moves very fast. I go through a lot of moods and emotions.

If you keep your mind active, regularly take on mental challenges, and continually think about the right things, you will develop the disciplined thinking that will help you with whatever you endeavor to do.

You can think your way into or out of almost any circumstance, good or bad.

I don't own my emotions unless I can think about them. I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly. I don't want to drown. My head is my heart's lifebelt.

Good thinking brings good feeling and good feeling brings good thinking.

I suppose the advocates of unreason think that there is a better chance of profitably deceiving the populace if they keep it in a state of effervescence.

To think, analyze and invent, he [Pierre Menard] also wrote me, “are not anomalous acts, but the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional fulfillment of this function, to treasure ancient thoughts of others, to remember with incredulous amazement that the doctor universal is thought, is to confess our languor or barbarism. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be." (Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote, 1939)

Thinking is a bit uncomfortable, but you'll get used to it. A matter of time and practice.

Clear thinking at the wrong moment can stifle creativity.

The essence of intelligence would seem to be in knowing when to think and act quickly, and knowing when to think and act slowly.

If you are willing to change your thinking, you can change your feelings. If you change your feelings, you can change your actions. And changing your actions - based on good thinking - can change your life.

If you are going to try and change things, you had better have your wits about you.

To see a shadow and think it is a tree that is a pity; but to see a tree and to think it a shadow can be fatal.

Human beings have the incredible capacity for denial. I think they do. And although it's really hard to believe, I have my doubts. But my feeling is that first they have to convince themselves. First they have to justify this stuff to themselves and if they can do that, even for just the moment that it's coming out their mouth, then they can kind of mouth it with kind of believable sincerity, even if some of us.

Feeling is what you get for thinking the way you do.

Try fighting with your head for a change... it's a good one, even if it does resist learning.

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

Let whoever can do so deceive me, he will never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I continue to think I am something.

There are many who have grave scruples about deceiving but think it as nothing to deceive themselves.

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.

A rational man is guided by his thinking - by a process of Reason - not by his feelings and desires.

If you are feeling good , it is because you are thinking good thoughts .