Alan Watts Quotes

There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.

There is only this now. It does not come from anywhere; it is not going anywhere. It is not permanent, but it is not impermanent. Though moving, it is always still. When we try to catch it, it seems to run away, and yet it is always here and there is no escape from it. And when we turn around to find the self which knows this moment, we find that it has vanished like the past.

The now, the here, through which all future plunges into the past.

A year's a long time, but it also flickers past in no time at all.

The moment rules over everything.

Time stays, we go.

Time doesn't go. Time stays. We go.

Time marks us while we are marking time.

People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have.

The present will not long endure.

Tomorrow doesn't really exist.

The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe.

Time sometimes passes quite quickly.

It ends all things: birds, trees, flowers, mountain tops, and business; it grinds stones to sand, and as terrible as it is, and it's the most beautiful thing we have in our lives - time.

You can't halt time.

There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again.

Reflect often upon the rapidity with which all existing things, or things coming into existence, sweep past us and are carried away.

My dear fellow,' Burlingame said, 'we sit here on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the worms will care, when anon they make a meal of you, whether you spent your moment sighing wigless in your chamber, or sacked the golden towns of Montezuma? Lookee, the day's nigh spent; 'tis gone careening into time forever. Not a tale's length past we lined our bowels with dinner, and already they growl for more. We are dying men, Ebenezer: i'faith, there's time for naught but bold resolves!

We think very little of time present; we anticipate the future, as being too slow, and with a view to hasten it onward, we recall the past to stay it as too swiftly gone. We are so thoughtless, that we thus wander through the hours which are not here, regardless only of the moment that is actually our own.

Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.

Time is a sandpile we run our fingers in.

All things fade and quickly turn to myth.

There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events and a parade of sensations and ideas passes through our head. Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant.

One realm we have never conquered: the pure present.

They had no past. They had no future. They just were.