Alan Watts Quotes

Wherever you are is the perfect place to awaken. This moment is the exact place to practice compassion and loving awareness. You have all the ingredients to breathe and find freedom just where you are.

Awareness is our true self; it's what we are. So we don't have to try to develop awareness; we simply need to notice how we block awareness with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgments. We're either in awareness, which is our natural state, or we're doing something else.

I'm in a space of surrendering and being open and seeing. It's a good place to be - the only place to be.

You can't wait for the end of your problems for you to be present. It has to be done whereever you are - which is now

The next message you need is always right where you are.

Awareness means grasping life just the way it is, without contamination by mental projections.

Let me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.

The whole world opens when we accept this moment, this very moment.

Awareness takes over from thinking. Instead of being in charge of your life, thinking becomes the servant of awareness.

Presence is not some exotic state that we need to search for or manufacture. In the simplest terms, it is the felt sense of wakefulness, openness, and tenderness that arises when we are fully here and now with our experience.

What I have learned over the years is to try to stay in the moment.

So being present becomes more and more the exercise the older you get.

If you ever find happiness by hunting for it, you will find it, as the old woman did her lost spectacles, safe on her own nose all the time.

You lose your habitual behavior, which allowed you to sort of zone out. You have to be here, you have to be now, you have to be present.

Listen to the silence. Listen to your life. Be present, not just think about what's going on next week, next month.

We always project into the future or reflect in the past, but we are so little in the present.

I travel so much and am always living out of a suitcase, so my favorite saying is 'Wherever you go, there you are'. I love it because it's reassuring to me that you have to live in the moment wherever you happen to be.

Being fully present is the best guarantee for a bright future.

Only when your consciousness is totally focused on the moment you are in can you receive whatever gift, lesson, or delight that moment has to offer.

I've known for years that you're supposed to be present. I know that thinking about what's happened or thinking about what I want is not going to get me anywhere, but until I quit doing it I'm not present.

My main hope for myself is to be where I am.

We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.

Don't wait to be successful at some future point. Have a successful relationship with the present moment and be fully present in whatever you are doing. That is success.

Meditation is a state of mind which looks at everything with complete attention, totally, not just parts of it. And no one can teach you how to be attentive. If any system teaches you how to be attentive, then you are attentive to the system, and that is not attention.