10 Alan Watts Quotes about happiness
Alan Watts, author of The Meaning of Happiness
Alan Watts was a British-born, naturalised American theosopher, writer and speaker, who dedicated his life’s work to making the teachings of the Eastern philosophies accessible to the folks in the West. The brilliant, sharp, and above all, highly amusing Zen Buddhist was a natural orator, and of all the great thinkers from recent decades, I truly wish I’d had the good fortune to hear him speak in public.
Watts wrote 25 books while he was alive, covering philosophy, observing and analysing the metaphysical or mystical, and the anatomy and psychology of Eastern and Western religions. We talk about Alan Watts from time to time on the How to Die Happy podcast, and I’ve no doubt that’ll continue for a long time to come.
One of Watts’ books was titled The Meaning of Happiness, which is undoubtedly relevant to you, our listeners, given the topic at hand. How to be happy? What does happiness mean to each of us and to the collective? While the book dives deeply into religious and philosophical territories to discuss humankind’s endless search for these answers, the clue was right there all along, in the book’s original title. You see, Watts wanted to call the book The Anatomy of Acceptance, but the publishers had other ideas.
Nonetheless, within the text, he still does a beautiful job of exploring the riches offered by understanding the nature of acceptance, its relationship with suffering driven by our relentless intolerance for change in all its impermanent forms. Simply put, to fully appreciate suffering, change, and acceptance is to find the answer to the initially posed question. And no doubt, we’ll spend many an hour exploring this in future episodes.
Meanwhile, here are ten quotes about happiness from Alan Watts.
#01
“For man is always bound so long as he depends for his happiness on a partial experience; joy must always give way to sorrow; otherwise, it can never be known as joy.”
#02
“All men suffer, but not all are unhappy, for unhappiness is a reaction to suffering, not suffering itself.”
#03
“Nothing that is isolated can live, since the two most important characteristics of life are circulation and change.”
#04
“Those who search for happiness do not find it because they do not understand that the object of the search is the seeker.”
#05
“For while scientist and logician dissect and analyse, the mystic looks for meaning in the whole.”
#06
“Thus, if man is to realise again his fundamental unity and harmony with life, he must proceed by the roundabout way of trying to get that which he already has until he convinces himself of his own folly. For it is only by trying to accept life as a whole that we can make ourselves aware that there was never any real need to try and that spirituality is, in fact, a matter of “becoming what we are.”
#07
“Unaccepted, the universe has no meaning; it is senseless fate and chaos, but acceptance is a way of discovering meaning, not of manufacturing it.”
#08
“Much of the secret of life consists in knowing how to laugh and also how to breathe.”
#09
“Don’t hurry for anything, and Don’t worry about the future. Don’t worry about what progress you’re making. Just be entirely content to be aware of what is.”
#10
“Don’t make a distinction between work and play. Regard everything that you’re doing as play, and don’t regard for one minute that you have to be serious about it.”
