Alan Watts Quotes

Let no man be called happy before his death. Till then, he is not happy, only lucky.

Call no man happy until he is dead, but only lucky.

Call no man happy before he dies, he is at best but fortunate.

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics.

Life on earth, filled with uncertainty and change, seemed far more difficult than what lay beyond the grave.

We are all going to die one day. Everything else, my friend, I am not sure.

Before a man dies, hold back and call him not happy but lucky.

Everyone wants to be foremost in this future-and yet death and the stillness of death are the only things certain and common to all in this future! How strange that this sole thing that is certain and common to all, exercises almost no influence on men, and that they are the furthest from regarding themselves as the brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that men do not want to think at all of the idea of death!

Count no mortal fortunate till he has departed this life free from pain.

Hope is the greatest madness. What can we expect of a world that we enter with the assurance of seeing our fathers and mothers die? A world where, if two beings love each other and give their lives to each other, both can be sure that one will watch the other perish?

Call no man happy before he dies.

The only time a dead certainty applies is in a dream world.

The world is impermanent. One should constantly remember death.

The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.

For the world, I count it not an inn, but a hospital; and a place not to live, but to die in.

I have lived: tomorrow the Father may fill the sky with black clouds or with cloudless sunshine.

No one could say how long that life would last. Whatever has form can disappear in an instant.

The world is so ordered that we must, in a material sense, lose everything we have and love, one thing after another, until we ourselves close our eyes.

We like to think of life as a constant ... Yet it can be ended in a heartbeat.

It's important to have a spiritual side because tomorrow's no promise to us. We have to pay homage to our saviour and put him in our life more because, without him, you don't know where you're going to go.

The future is uncertain but the end is always near.

Probability is the guide of life, and of death, too.

Life scars us with its random motion, he thought. Only death is perfect.