Alan Watts (Jan 6, 1915 – Nov 16, 1973) was a philosopher known for opening Western minds to Eastern wisdom. He called himself an entertainer, rather than a guru or teacher, and encouraged a dialogue that is increasingly relevant in the spectrum of current events. Intertwined with stunning scholarship, his buoyant humor resounds, linking many of us to the collective unconscious. Today, 101 years after his birth, I’m sharing 101 quotes that have deeply impacted my understanding of the human experience. Enjoy!

*Alan Watts was a prolific writer and speaker. I source the specific work for every quote that I can, and include “(audio)” to reference material sourced from audio lectures found on alanwatts.org and alanwatts.com. Hearing his voice and cadence drives his message to a deeper level; I recommend Alan Watts 101 for short animated videos coupled with some of my favorite talks.

“This very moment, this very world, this very body is the point. Now. You see? But, if you’re seeking something beyond all the time, you never get with it. You’re never here.” ~Zen And The West (audio)

“The physical world is diaphanous. It’s like music. When you play music, it simply disappears. There’s nothing left. And, for that very reason it is one of the highest and most spiritual of the arts, because it is the most transient.” ~Comparative Philosophy (audio)

“We’re living in a fluid universe, in which the art of faith is not in taking one’s stand, but in learning to swim.”

“Buddha is the man who woke up, who discovered who he really was.” ~Buddhism the Religion of No Religion

“What do we mean by ‘I’? We mean the symbol of ourselves. Now ourselves, in this case, is the whole psycho-physical organism—conscious and unconscious, plus its environment. That’s your real self. Your real self, in other words, is the universe as centered on your organism.”

“Consciousness is rather unfolding, the ‘e-volution,’ of what has always been hidden in the heart of the primordial universe of stars […] It is in the living organism that the whole world feels; it is only by virtue of eyes that the stars themselves are light.” ~Nature, Man and Woman

“Money is the same order of reality as inches, grams, or lines of longitude and latitude. It is an abstraction. It is a method of bookkeeping to obviate the cumbersome procedures of barter. But our culture, our civilization, is entirely hung up on the notion that money has an independent reality of its own.”

“Supposing you knew the future and could control it perfectly, what would you do? You’d say: ‘Let’s shuffle the deck and have another deal.'” ~Image of Man (audio)

“I see that resistance, ego, is just an extra vortex in the stream—part of it—and that in fact there is no actual resistance at all. There is no point from which to confront life, or stand against it.” ~The Joyous Cosmology

“The physical universe is basically playful. There’s no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn’t going anywhere; that is to say, it doesn’t have a destination that it ought to arrive at. But it is best understood by analogy to music, because music as an art form is essentially playful.” ~The Tao of Philosophy (audio)

“We have been hypnotized—literally hypnotized—by social convention into feeling and sensing that we exist only inside of our skins… That we are not the original big bang, but just something out on the end of it. And therefore, everybody feels unhappy and miserable.”

“When you are not getting in the way of yourself, you will begin to find out that all the great things you do are really happenings. All growth is something that happens. For growth to happen two things are important. You must have the technical ability to express what happens. And secondly, you must get out of your own way.”

“Let’s ask, ‘How big is the sun?’ Are we going to define the sun as limited by the extent of its fire? That’s one possible definition. But we could equally well define the sphere of the sun by the extent of its light.” ~Time

“The more it sides with itself, the more the good soul reveals its inseparable shadow, and the more it disowns its shadow the more it becomes it.” ~The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

“Nature is really formless, in the sense that it is one form. Naming a cloud a cloud does not separate the cloud from the sky. Just as when you pick up water into a sieve, you don’t succeed in separating the water into strips.”

“The possibility of seeing down into something goes on forever and ever. When you work with mantras, you can learn to hear similar infinite depths in sound.” ~Buddhism The Religion of No Religion

~Compiled by Annie Tichenor, with the help of Mark Watts, Nicolette Schumacher, and Allison Faust