To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling …

Alan Watts
313 citations
To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.
Humanity
25

More Author Quotes

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.
...[W]ords can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences. ✨ Alan W. Watts (2011). The Way of Zen, p.19, Vintage
Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea … ▶
Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
For the world is an ever-elusive and ever-disappointing mirage only from the standpoint of someone standing aside from it—as if it were quite other than himself—and then trying to grasp it. But a thi … ▶

To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.

More Author Quotes

Most Cited Authors

The Best Quotes

Most Liked Authors

Curated Author Quotes