Alan Watts Words of Wisdom

Words of wisdom from The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts...

If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will of the wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.

Where belief in the eternal because impossible, and there is only the poor substitute of belief in believing, men seek their happiness in the joys of time.

As far as we can judge, every animal is so busy with what he is doing at the moment that it never answers his head to ask whether life has a meeting or a future.

We fall in love with people and possessions only to be tortured by anxiety for them.

So long as the mind is split, life is perpetual conflict, tension, frustration, and disillusion. 

But the best pleasures are those for which we do not plan, and the worst part of pain is expecting it and trying to get away from it when it has come. You cannot plan to be happy. You can plan to exist, but in themselves existence and nonexistence are neither pleasurable nor painful.

The Christian mind has always been haunted by the feeling that the sins of the Saints are worse than the sins of the sinners, in some mysterious way the one who is struggling for salvation is nearer to hell and to the heart is evil than the unashamed harlot or thief.