Alan Watts Quotes

There is only the moment. The now. Only what you are experiencing at this second is real.

The past is no more and the future is not yet. The only right person is one who lives moment to moment, whose arrow is directed to the moment, who is always here and now; wherever he is, his whole consciousness, his whole being, is involved in the reality of here and in the reality of now.

The present moment is all you ever have. There is never a time when your life is not 'this moment.' Is this not a fact?

Nobody really lives in the present.

People don't realize that now is all there ever is; there is no past or future except as memory or anticipation in your mind.

You can be aware of the passing of time without being nostalgic.

A great source of calamity lies in regret and anticipation; therefore a person is wise who thinks of the present alone, regardless of the past or future.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

If the mind wants to comprehend reality, it will have to come out of the past and the future. But coming out of the past and the future, it is no longer the mind at all. Hence the insistence of all the great masters of the world that the door to reality is no-mind.

The present moment dies every moment to become the past , is reborn every moment into the future. All experience is now. Now never ends.

Awareness requires living in the here and now, and not in the elsewhere, the past or the future.

Zen is really just a reminder to stay alive and to be awake. We tend to daydream all the time, speculating about the future and dwelling on the past. Zen practice is about appreciating your life in this moment. If you are truly aware of five minutes a day, then you are doing pretty well. We are beset by both the future and the past, and there is no reality apart from the here and now.

There is neither Past nor Future. There is only the Present.

There's nothing in the future and there's nothing in the past. There is only this one moment, and you've got to make it last.

I don't want to lean back into the past, or forward into the future. I don't want to wish the present moment away. The truth is in the present moment. The great paradox is that when I'm really able to do that, time slows down and opens up. Time feels suddenly and inexplicably without end.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

Spirituality tells the seeker not to live in the hoary past, not to live in the remote future, but to live in the immediacy of today, in the eternal Now.

Time past and time future allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time.

I always live in the present. I don’t know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing.

Attention-yes! That's present! And present, you see, makes past and future.

Right now a moment of time is passing by!... We must become that moment.

Truth is always here. That's the only way truth can be. Truth cannot be anywhere else. The only time it can be is here, and the only place it can be is now. But the mind is never here and is never now. Hence, mind and truth never meet. The mind goes on thinking about truth, and the truth goes on waiting to be realized, but the meeting never happens. The meeting is possible only if mind stops functioning, because mind means the past, mind means the future. Mind is never here-now. Whenever you start thinking, you are going astray. If you stop thinking, suddenly you are at home.

NOW is All There is & the Future is Just Another Present Moment to Live when it Arrives

There is no past. That's another illusion. Everything that has ever happened to you, to me, to anyone in this world, happened in the present moment. That's all there ever is. So your relationship to life isn't your relationship to your past, it's your relationship to the present moment.

Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real--the here-and-now. Seize the day.