Alan Watts Quotes

I like change. There's something Buddhist about it - continuous change is wonderful.

Stability is not the way of the world.

So we're in this process of letting go of our own attachments to our physical forms and to the people we love, and... basically everything. Life is like this one big process of letting go.

Our being is continually undergoing and entering upon changes. ... We must, strictly speaking, at every moment give each other up and let each other go and not hold each other back.

As long as you are a part of the physical process of the existence, there is nothing that does not change.

Life is a flux, nothing abides. Still we are such fools, we go on clinging. If change is the nature of life, then clinging is stupidity, because your clinging is not going to change the law of life. Your clinging is only going to make you miserable. Things are bound to change; whether you cling or not does not matter. If you cling you become miserable: you cling and they change, you feel frustrated. If you don't cling they still change, but then there is no frustration because you were perfectly aware that they are bound to change. This is how things are, this is the suchness of life.

The world is nothing but change, our life is only perception.

One must be deeply aware of the impermanence of the world.

Our sense that things are transient, that everything is passing and then if you want to save something from the endless flux of experience and the world's movement, you have to set down a stake and try and make something that will last.

How much can come And much can go, And yet abide the world!

A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.

All progression is in the relative world.

The world is changing every moment, and is therefore unreal. It has non permanent existence.

People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.

The hard thing about death is that nothing ever changes. The hard thing about life is that nothing stays the same.

I saw that nothing was permanent. You don't want to possess anything that is dear to you because you might lose it.

No man can lose what he never had.

Weep not that the world changes - did it keep a stable, changeless state, it were cause indeed to weep.

You too must not count too much on your reality as you feel it today, since like yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.

So how can you lose what you've never owned?

Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.

It's very easy to think that the way things are is the way things will stay, and life just isn't like that.

If I change car, I change car. I don't get very fond of things.

There is no essence, but there is a flux that is more real than any instance of the flux, such as a milk bottle or a tiger.

If you acquire things, you have to let them go.