Alan Watts Quotes

Human life [is] ... a process of filling in time until the arrival of death, or Santa Claus, with very little choice, if any, of what kind of business one is going to transact during the long wait.

Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?

A philosopher once noted that people long for immortality but run out of things to do on a rainy afternoon.

Try as I do to comprehend the human project and my part in it, I am further than ever from understanding the monstrous everyday things that seem like self-evident truths and existential necessities to so many.

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

To be human is to keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence, hollering, 'What's it for?'

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

How can we live and die and never know the difference?

You don't waste your entire life waiting to go back to dust.

The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.

I hate to think life is just facts and laws.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.

The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which will last forever.

I've jokingly said that everything I'm doing now is filling up the hours before I die, but I do feel that slightly. I have no religious beliefs so this is the ride. This is it. So I'm just like anyone, I suppose, trying to fill out the days in the most interesting way possible.

At the heart of life lies a mystery that everybody has to wrestle with. What the heck are we doing here? How does this world work, and how do I fit?

Everything I do is somehow rooted in humanity. It's always about people; it's always about ego. It's always about desperation. It's quite existential. You know, 'Am I leading a good life?' That might be because I'm an atheist, and I think this is all we've got, so you better be nice. And have fun.

You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.

What is life about? Two things: love and death.

What's the point of our life? Everything seems absurd until we die, and then it makes sense.

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.

Oh, it is not death that frightens me, but the impossibility of imparting some meaning to my past.

So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he was and for what purpose he had been placed in the word.