Alan Watts Quotes

I have to live in the truth that this is who I am. That's what I need to focus on.

You can't build a future if you do not know who you are. You can't become who you are meant to be if you can't tell the truth about who you are, what you have, and everything about your life. The truth is the absolute essence to your success, while lies are the absolute essence to your failures.

To be rather than to seem.

Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be.

I am never more myself than in my self-betrayals.

Not one of us can lie or pretend. We're all fixed in good faith in a certain concept of ourselves.

It is easy for me to put on a show and be cocky..but to express oneself honestly not lying to oneself, now that my friend is very hard to do

I'm always aware that there are, broadly speaking, two different ways to act: there is acting, and then there's being, and I'm always more interested in that.

Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

We cannot forever hide the truth about ourselves, from ourselves.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.

I have faced up to what I am.

If I'm gonna tell a real story, I'm gonna start with my name.

You can't live a lie. You have to follow your heart.

We get so much in the habit of wearing disguises before others that we finally appear disguised before ourselves.

The second you're not honest with yourself, you've lost everything.

I am truth. I was made of truth.

I'm trying to know who I am and be honest about it.

I'm as real as they come.

You can spend time self-identifying and figuring out what you are on that, but at some point, you just want to be who you are and not walk around telling people.

I am who I am, you are who you are, and everything else is a perception based on acceptance, deception, smoke, mirrors, and so on. It's what's between us that seems to justify our accidental identities.

Esse quam videri," Celia says. "To be, rather than to seem.

I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.