Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
What These Words Mean
You know that moment when you want certainty so badly you can almost taste it, and yet life keeps offering you a door without a label. Your mind reaches for proof, a guarantee, a map. These words meet you right there, not with an answer, but with a different posture.
Starting with “Faith is,” the quote points to faith as something real you can have, not just a mood you fall into. It treats faith like a stance you take, something you practice, even when your thoughts are loud. The feeling underneath is steadying: faith is available to you as an action, not a special gift reserved for certain people.
Then it says “above all,” and that small phrase changes the hierarchy. It suggests faith can include beliefs, rituals, or ideas, but there is one quality sitting at the center. When you hear “above all,” you are being asked to set aside the usual definitions and look for the most essential ingredient, the thing that makes faith recognizable even when everything else is stripped away.
That essential ingredient is named as “openness.” On the surface, openness is simply not closing the door, not locking yourself into a single protected position. Emotionally, it is a willingness to be touched by what you cannot fully control: new information, new people, a new version of yourself. Openness is vulnerable because it admits you do not already know. And it is brave because it keeps your heart and attention available even when the safest move would be to shut down.
The quote then offers a second description: “an act of trust.” That wording makes faith active, not passive. It is not waiting for your fear to disappear; it is choosing to place weight somewhere. Trust, here, is not a conclusion you reach after enough evidence piles up. It is a small deliberate motion: you lean forward anyway, you answer the message anyway, you tell the truth anyway. I like how plain that is, because it makes faith feel less like a performance and more like a choice you can repeat.
The pivot matters: it moves from “above all” to “openness,” and then to “an act of trust” using the connector “;” as if the second phrase is the lived expression of the first.
Finally, that trust is aimed “in the unknown.” On the surface, the unknown is what you cannot predict or confirm. Deeper down, it is the part of life that refuses to be reduced to a plan: the outcome of your efforts, the way people will respond, the version of tomorrow that does not yet exist. Trusting the unknown is not pretending it is friendly; it is admitting it is real and still choosing to meet it without armor.
Picture a regular day: you are about to send an email that could change a relationship at work, and your finger hovers over “send” while the room is quiet except for the soft hum of a computer fan. Openness looks like allowing the possibility that the reply might surprise you. Trust looks like pressing “send” without rehearsing a thousand defenses first. The unknown is the stretch of time between your action and the response, when you cannot manage the story anymore.
These words do not claim faith is certainty. They place it closer to curiosity with a spine.
Still, the quote does not fully hold in every inner climate. Sometimes you are not closed because you are stubborn, but because you are tired, and openness feels like one more demand on an already stretched self.
Behind These Words
Alan Watts, a writer and speaker associated with bringing Eastern philosophy into everyday Western conversation, often circles around the tension between control and reality. The world he addresses is one where people are trained to seek security through certainty: the right belief, the right plan, the right explanation. In that atmosphere, faith easily gets reduced to holding the correct ideas tightly enough.
A saying like this makes sense as a gentle correction. It leans away from faith as a fixed set of answers and toward faith as a way of relating to experience. Many spiritual and philosophical traditions Watts engages with emphasize direct encounter over rigid certainty: paying attention, letting life be as it is, and noticing how much suffering comes from clinging.
Culturally, these words also fit a time when psychology, spirituality, and self-inquiry were entering mainstream conversations. People were experimenting with new frameworks for meaning, often after finding older certainties less convincing. The quote speaks to that search without shaming it, offering a definition of faith that can live even when you do not feel sure.
Attribution note: this phrase is widely shared under Watts’ name, and like many popular quotations, it is sometimes repeated without clear sourcing in casual collections.
About Alan Watts
Alan Watts, a philosopher, writer, and speaker, is known for translating ideas from Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and other contemplative traditions into clear, relatable language. His work often focuses on the ways people trap themselves by trying to control life too tightly, and how relief can come through a more direct, trusting relationship with experience.
Rather than treating spirituality as an escape from ordinary life, he tends to bring it into the ordinary: your fear, your desire to be certain, your habit of labeling things safe or unsafe. He is remembered for a voice that is both playful and piercing, the kind that can loosen a tight grip without turning serious questions into shallow comfort.
This quote fits that worldview neatly. Defining faith as openness reframes it as receptivity instead of possession. Calling it an act of trust makes it something you do in real time, not something you win by thinking hard enough. And placing that trust in the unknown points straight at the human instinct to demand guarantees, then gently invites you to practice living without them.
