Alan Watts Quotes

It isn't enough to love people because they're good to you, or because in some way or other you're going to get something by it. We have to love because we love loving.

The magic of purpose and of love in its purest form. Not televison love, with its glare and hollow and sequined glint; not sex and allure, all high shoes and high drama, everything both too small and in too much excess, but just love. Love like rain, like the smell of a tangerine, like a surprise found in your pocket.

Love is selflessness and self-fullness; it can only be known deeply with an open, vulnerable heart.

The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.

Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being.

If we seek to be loved - if we expect to be loved - this cannot be accomplished; we will be dependent and grasping not genuinely loving.

There is no power greater than true affection.

The mistake we make, is when we seek to be beloved, instead of loving.

Love can never be a sin. It can be only a blessing. Even if you're not loved in return -- though I can't imagine that -- to love is a proof of life -- indeed, it's the only proof, for once you can't love another human being, you're not alive.

When you do not require a person to show up as you imagine you need them to be, then you can drop expectation. Then you love them exactly as they are. Yet this can only happen when you love your Self exactly as you are

Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something- and it is only such love that can know freedom.

The first duty of a leader is to make himself be loved without courting love. To be loved without 'playing up' to anyone - even to himself.

Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.

I love my children and I love my wife with all my heart. And I would die, die gladly, if that would make a better life for them.

Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.

If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship, we must love friends for their sake rather than for our own.

A year or so ago I went through all the people in my life and asked myself: does this person inspire me, genuinely love me and support me unconditionally? I wanted nothing but positive influences in my life.

He who loves with purity considers not the gift of the lover, but the love of the giver.

No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

My mother was a courageous woman, and she had such tremendous love for life. She loved the natural world. She would wake us up in the middle of the night to go look at the moon. When I was a teenager, this was a source of great frustration because I wanted to sleep.

I said only one word, brought only one message: Love. Love - nothing else.

The true power of love is found in selfless attitudes and actions that seek the best for another person without expecting anything in return. When we act in that way, the feeling of love follows close behind.

It is a lot easier to prove that you don't love someone than it is to prove that you do, but one of the best 'proofs' I know is the desire to devote time to the person with no expectation of any sort of compensation, including gratitude, in return.