Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Alan Watts, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Alan Watts quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 280 Alan Watts quotes for you to read and share.

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Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we're not alone. -- Alan Watts
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The best way to convince someone is by making him realize that what you speak came from his own mind. -- Alan Watts
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Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith-in life, in other people, and in oneself-is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time. -- Alan Watts
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It's time to question a job or career move when it seems like most energy is devoted to making things appear other than what they really are. -- Alan Watts
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We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can't slow down enough to enjoy them when they come. -- Alan Watts
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Sexual love is a troubled and problematic relationship in cultures where there is a strong sense of man's separation from nature, especially when the realm of nature is felt to be inferior or contaminated with evil. -- Alan Watts
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There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it. -- Alan Watts
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And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plowshares into swords -- Alan Watts
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The secret of the enjoyment of pleasure is to know when to stop. Man doesn't learn this secret easily, but to shun pleasure altogether is cowardly avoidance of a difficult job. For we have to learn the art of enjoying things BECAUSE they are impermanent. -- Alan Watts
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The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile. -- Alan Watts
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In Hindu philosophy the whole creation is regarded as the Vishnu Lila, the play of Vishnu. Lila means dance or play. Also in Hindu philosophy, they call the world illusion; and in Latin the root of the word illusion is ludere, to play. -- Alan Watts
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Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment. -- Alan Watts
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The life of Zen begins, therefore, in a disillusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really exist the good without the bad, the gratification of a self which is no more than an idea, and the morrow which never comes. -- Alan Watts
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Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up. -- Alan Watts
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There is an ineffable mystery that underlies ourselves and the world. It is the darkness from which the light shines. When you recognize the integrity of the universe and that death is as certain as birth, then you can relax and accept that this is the way it is. There is nothing else to do. -- Alan Watts
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Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe. -- Alan Watts
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This is what Zen means by being detached - not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water. -- Alan Watts
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Courage is the goal of cowards. -- Alan Watts
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You can't figure out the Universe, especially if you're using figures to figure it. -- Alan Watts
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By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us. -- Alan Watts
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Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons. -- Alan Watts
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Beyond positive and negative, what is Reality? -- Alan Watts
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They are enlightened who join in this play knowing it as play, for people suffer only because they take as serious what the gods made for fun. -- Alan Watts
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No one's mouth is big enough to utter the whole thing. -- Alan Watts
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The role of the Guru is to show the person that he already has what he is looking for. -- Alan Watts
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Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be -- Alan Watts
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In life as well as in art Zen never wastes energy in stopping to explain; it only indicates. -- Alan Watts
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Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person. -- Alan Watts
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To feel life is meaningless unless "I" can be permanent is like having desperately fallen in love with an inch. -- Alan Watts
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To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it. -- Alan Watts
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Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain; the most complicated thing in the world, which you yourself grew ... without even thinking about it. -- Alan Watts
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Chaos is always losing, but never defeated -- Alan Watts
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Mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism ... they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters. -- Alan Watts
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The Universe is the game of the self, which plays hide and seek forever and ever. -- Alan Watts
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The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings, the past and the future are not as real, but rather more real than the present. -- Alan Watts
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The further and further we look out with our telescopes and the further and further we look in with our microscopes, the larger and larger and smaller and smaller the universe becomes in order to escape the investigation because we are the universe looking at itself. -- Alan Watts
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No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen. -- Alan Watts
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The Tao belongs neither to knowing nor not knowing. Knowing is false understanding; not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it's like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong? -- Alan Watts
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You, yourself, are the eternal energy which appears as this Universe. You didn't come into this world; you came out of it. Like a wave from the ocean. -- Alan Watts
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The fools standpoint is that all social institutions are games. He sees the whole world as game playing. That's why, when people take their games seriously and take on stern and pious expressions, the fool gets the giggles because he knows that it is all a game. -- Alan Watts
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Every explicit duality is an implicit unity. -- Alan Watts
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But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us. -- Alan Watts
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And so when the essential idea of love is lost there comes talk of fidelity. Actually, the only possible basis for two beings, male and female, to relate to each other is to grant each other total freedom. -- Alan Watts
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Increasingly, we're developing all kinds of systems for verifying reality by echoing it. -- Alan Watts
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What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life? -- Alan Watts
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I knew of a physicist at the University of Chicago who was rather crazy like some scientists, and the idea of the insolidity, the instability of the physical world impressed him so much that he used to go around in enormous padded slippers for fear he should fall through the floor. -- Alan Watts
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The future is a concept, it doesn't exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is always now. That's one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now. -- Alan Watts
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The materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature. -- Alan Watts
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So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself. -- Alan Watts
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The world is in an extremely dangerous situation, and serious diseases often require the risk of a dangerous cure like the Pasteur serum for rabies. -- Alan Watts
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The animal tends to eat with his stomach, and the man with his brain. When the animal's stomach is full, he stops eating, but the man is never sure when to stop. When he has eaten as much as his belly can take, he still feels empty, he still feels an urge for further gratification. -- Alan Watts
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What are we saying when we say now, something is holy? That means you should take a different attitude to what you are doing than if you were, for example, doing it for kicks. -- Alan Watts
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When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. -- Alan Watts
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Thought is a means of concealing Truth. -- Alan Watts
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A chest of gold coins or a fat wallet of bills is of no use
whatsoever to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft. -- Alan Watts
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I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution , where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment ... only to vanish forever. -- Alan Watts
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And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on. -- Alan Watts
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So many people of wealth understand much more about making and saving money than about using and enjoying it. They fail to live because they are always preparing to live. -- Alan Watts
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There is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion. -- Alan Watts
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When you really understand that you are
what you see and know, you do not run around
the countryside thinking, "I am all this!"
There is simply all this ... -- Alan Watts
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Wars based on principle are far more destructive ... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after. -- Alan Watts
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To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself. -- Alan Watts
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The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present. -- Alan Watts
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Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it. -- Alan Watts
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There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again. -- Alan Watts
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For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase - oddly enough - to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization. -- Alan Watts
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Western religions are more concerned with behavior, doctrine, and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and our world. -- Alan Watts
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Faith ... is letting go and trusting oneself to the unknown. -- Alan Watts
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However much I may be impressed by the difference between a star and the dark space around it, I must not forget that I can see the two only in relation to each other, and that this relation is inseparable. -- Alan Watts
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There is a deep, peaceful calm in the dawning of a new day. -- Alan Watts
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As muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone, it could be argued that those who sit quietly and do nothing are making one of the best possible contributions to a world in turmoil. -- Alan Watts
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The world is a marvelous system of wiggles. -- Alan Watts
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That's a waste of time. If you really understand Zen ... you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because ... the sound of the rain needs no translation. -- Alan Watts
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Billions of years ago you were a big bang. But now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off. And don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. -- Alan Watts
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You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes. -- Alan Watts
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Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time as much as patterns in space. -- Alan Watts
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When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there ... You're looking at you.. -- Alan Watts
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You're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe. -- Alan Watts
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I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek. -- Alan Watts
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If you can't meditate in a boiler room, you can't meditate. -- Alan Watts
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Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is. -- Alan Watts
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I was talking to a Zen master the other day and he said, "You shall be my disciple."I looked at him and said, "Who was Buddha's teacher?" He looked at me in a very odd way for a moment and then he burst into laughter and handed me a piece of clover. -- Alan Watts
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The sense of wrong is simply failure to see where something fits into a pattern, to be confused as to the hierarchical level upon which an event belongs. -- Alan Watts
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There is no coming toward it or going away from it; it is, and you are it. -- Alan Watts
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We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible. -- Alan Watts
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Religion is always falling apart. -- Alan Watts
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In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way. -- Alan Watts
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Do you define yourself as a victim of the world? Or, as the world? -- Alan Watts
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To remain caught up in ideas and words about Zen is, as the old masters say, to stink of Zen. -- Alan Watts
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We all need to go out of our minds at least once a day.
When we go out of our minds we quickly come to our senses. -- Alan Watts
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Although profoundly "inconsequential," the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied it lends an unmistakable quality to the work. -- Alan Watts
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The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible. -- Alan Watts
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The harder we try to catch hold of the moment, to seize a pleasant sensation ... , the more elusive it becomes ... It is like trying to clutch water in one's hands - the harder one grips, the faster it slips through one's fingers. -- Alan Watts
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All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head. -- Alan Watts
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The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money ... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination. -- Alan Watts
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What keeps us from happiness is our inability to fully inhabit the present -- Alan Watts
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So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing. -- Alan Watts
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How did you know you're alive, unless you'd once been dead? -- Alan Watts
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For a decision-the freest of my actions just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me. -- Alan Watts
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And the more you become aware of the unknown self - if you become aware of it - the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is. -- Alan Watts
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In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life. -- Alan Watts
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Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery. -- Alan Watts
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Altough we all realize that monotony is boring, almost every form of industrial work- banking, accounting, mass-producing, service- is monotonous, and most people are paid for simply putting up with monotony -- Alan Watts
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You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean. -- Alan Watts
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The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events
that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies
and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends. -- Alan Watts
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We tend to regard ourselves as puppets of the Past, driven along by something that is always behind us. -- Alan Watts
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But the disappearance of the effort to let go is precisely the disappearance of the separate thinker, of the ego trying to watch the mind without interfering. -- Alan Watts
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There is a peculiar contradiction in trying to be a member of a republic while believing that the universe is a monarchy. -- Alan Watts
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What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do. -- Alan Watts
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It is the seeker, who understands there is more than what meets the eye, who is not afraid and makes the choice to go into the unknown. The process of awaking has begun, the discovery is underway. -- Alan Watts
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Lack of love for the vegetative, subtle, cthonic, pagan, and sexy aspect of the world means death. -- Alan Watts
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The whole universe is through and through the playing of love in every shade of the word's use, from animal lust to divine charity. -- Alan Watts
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All I'm saying is that minerals are just a rudimentary form of consciousness whereas the other people are saying that consciousness is a complicated form of minerals. -- Alan Watts
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We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity. -- Alan Watts
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To perceive that form reveals the void, and to see that the void reveals form, is the secret for the overcoming of death. To the extent that one is unaware of space, one is unaware of one's own eternity - it's the same thing! -- Alan Watts
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And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment. -- Alan Watts
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This present moment never comes to be and it never ceases to be, it is simply our minds that construct the continuity of thoughts we call time. In the present moment is nirvana. -- Alan Watts
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The anitya doctrine is, again, not quite the simple assertion that the world is impermanent, but rather that the more one grasps at the world, the more it changes. -- Alan Watts
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If a flower had a God it would not be a transcendental flower but a field. -- Alan Watts
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More and more we try to effect an adaptation to life by means of external gadgets, and attempt to solve our problems by conscious thinking rather than unconscious 'know-how'. This is much less to our advantage than we like to suppose. -- Alan Watts
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We are not clear as to the role in life of these chemicals; nor are we clear as to the role of the physician. You know, of course, that in ancient times there was no clear distinction between priest and physician. -- Alan Watts
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You can't live at all unless you can live fully now. -- Alan Watts
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How could you say the best form of government is a republic if you think the universe is a monarchy? -- Alan Watts
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I would suggest that today, we know about as much concerning the human mind as we knew about the galaxy in 1300. -- Alan Watts
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So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level. -- Alan Watts
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You are something that the whole world is doing just as when the sea has waves on it. -- Alan Watts
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As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses. -- Alan Watts
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But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be. -- Alan Watts
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To be alive spiritually man must have union with God and must be conscious of it. Apart from this union his religious life will be an empty drudgery, a mere imitation of true spirituality. -- Alan Watts
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Spiritual awakening is the difficult process whereby the increasing realisation that everything is as wrong as it can be flips suddenly into the realisation that everything is as right is it can be. Or better, everything is as It as it can be. -- Alan Watts
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The idea of the Universe being ruled by that marvelous old gentleman, is no longer plausible. It isn't that anybody has disproved it, but it just somehow doesn't go with the vast infinitude of the Universe. -- Alan Watts
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Where-so-ever beings exist throughout all galaxies, it doesn't make any difference - you are all of them ... and when they come into being, that's you coming into being. -- Alan Watts
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Buddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent ... this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering. -- Alan Watts
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As the fish doesn't know water, people are ignorant of space. Consciousness is concerned only with changing and varying details; it ignores constants-especially constant backgrounds. Thus only very exceptional people are aware of what is basic to everything. -- Alan Watts
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Just what should a young man or woman know to be 'in the know'? Is there, in other words, some inside information, some special taboo, some real lowdown on life and existence that most parents and teachers either don't know or won't tell? -- Alan Watts
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You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it. -- Alan Watts
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The self-styled practical man of affairs who pooh-poohs philosophy as a lot of windy notions is himself a pragmatist or a positivist, and a bad one at that, since he has given no thought to his position. -- Alan Watts
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But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is. -- Alan Watts
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People often say to me, 'I understand what you are talking about intellectually, but I don't really feel it, I don't realize it,' and I am apt to reply, 'I wonder whether you do understand it intellectually, because if you did you would also feel it.' -- Alan Watts
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But we must not suffer over the suffering. -- Alan Watts
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If you love a person, you say to that person, "Look, I love you, whatever that may be. I've seen quite a bit of it and I know there's lots that I haven't seen, but still it's you and I want you to be what you want to be. And I won't be happy if I've got you in a cage. You'd be a bird without song." -- Alan Watts
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If you are ready to wake up, you are going to wake up. If you're not you are going to stay pretending that you are just a poor little me ... -- Alan Watts
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Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. -- Alan Watts
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In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all. -- Alan Watts
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These people, as far as I can see, do not congregate in the notorious centers of the movement, like the North Beach in San Francisco or Greenwich Village, or Venice, California. -- Alan Watts
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Cows scream louder than carrots. -- Alan Watts
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The problem is to overcome the ingrained disbelief in the power of winning nature by love, in the gentle (ju) way (do) of turning with the skid, of controlling ourselves by cooperating with ourselves. -- Alan Watts
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We are all as much extraordinary phenomena of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars and the form of a galaxy. -- Alan Watts
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You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. -- Alan Watts
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Change is an illusion because we're always at the place where any future can take us. -- Alan Watts
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LSD is simply an exploratory instrument like a microscope or telescope, except this one is inside of you instead of outside of you. -- Alan Watts
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The psychotherapist ... tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to be in the world (of social convention) but not of the world. -- Alan Watts
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Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars. -- Alan Watts
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It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn. -- Alan Watts
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Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever. -- Alan Watts
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Carried to its final extreme, the logical end of this type of reaction to life is suicide. The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead -- Alan Watts
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Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it. -- Alan Watts
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Our view of reality is like a chart of the sea - the truer it is, the less likely we will become lost. -- Alan Watts
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You can't make love without art. -- Alan Watts
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You know that if you get in the water and have nothing to hold on to, but try to behave as you would on dry land, you will drown. But if, on the other hand, you trust yourself to the water and let go, you will float. And this is exactly the situation of faith. -- Alan Watts
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We must be careful that the business we build does not become mere busyness. -- Alan Watts
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When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be. -- Alan Watts
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You are the universe experiencing itself. -- Alan Watts
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You can't get wet from the word 'water.' -- Alan Watts
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The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is -- Alan Watts
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A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted. -- Alan Watts
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The sound of the rain needs no translation. In music one doesn't make the end of the composition the point of the composition ... Same way in dancing, you don't aim at one particular spot in the room ... The whole point of dancing is the dance. -- Alan Watts
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We usually don't look. We overlook. -- Alan Watts
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What would you do if money was no object? -- Alan Watts
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You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you. -- Alan Watts
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Just as the ocean is waving so each one of us is a waving of the whole cosmos, the entire works, all there is. -- Alan Watts
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When one speaks of awakening, it means de-hypnotizatio n; coming to your senses. But of course to do that, you have to go out of your mind. -- Alan Watts
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We have a strange anxiety in us; that if we don't interfere then it won't happen. Now that's the root of an enormous amount of trouble. -- Alan Watts
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Everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality ... -- Alan Watts
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Running away from fear is fear; fighting pain is pain; trying to be brave is being scared -- Alan Watts
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Many people think that the Bible is the authentic word of God and they worship the Bible, making it an idol ... -- Alan Watts
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The real Zen of the old Chinese masters was wu-shih, or "no fuss." -- Alan Watts
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A holy person is someone who is whole; who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites. -- Alan Watts
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The question is not what I should do in the future to get it, but rather, what am I presently doing that prevents me from realizing it right now? -- Alan Watts
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Sex is no longer a serious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more about it than adults. -- Alan Watts
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Our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don't learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life. -- Alan Watts
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Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is. -- Alan Watts
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Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure. -- Alan Watts
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Preliminary accounting, banking and surveying (known as arithmetic, algebra and geometry). -- Alan Watts
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The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing. -- Alan Watts
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Truly great companies are built on ideals, not just deals. -- Alan Watts
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The wake doesn't drive the ship -- Alan Watts
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I want ... to consort with people whose emotions are not ... cold and standoffish. -- Alan Watts
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Basically, there is simply nothing to worry about, because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe. -- Alan Watts
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The biggest ego trip going is getting rid of your ego -- Alan Watts
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Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them. -- Alan Watts
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The difference between a baby and adult is that a baby believes in everything while the adult doubts everything. Babies also only tell the truth until they learn what a lie is. -- Alan Watts
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To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam. -- Alan Watts
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The individual may be understood as one particular focal point at which the whole universe expresses itself - as an incarnation of the self, or of the Godhead, or whatever one may choose to call it. -- Alan Watts
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The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge. Just as a knife doesn't cut itself, fire doesn't burn itself, light doesn't illuminate itself. It's always an endless mystery to itself. -- Alan Watts
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Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time. -- Alan Watts
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At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but do not seem to make a "problem" of it. -- Alan Watts
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The trouble with many religions, accused of wishful thinking, is that they are not wishful enough. They show a deplorable lack of imagination. -- Alan Watts
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When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing but things. -- Alan Watts
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Philosophy is man's expression of curiosity about everything and his attempt to make sense of the world primarily through his intellect. -- Alan Watts
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We see what we believe rather than what we see. -- Alan Watts
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Of course, you can't force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flatiron. Water becomes clear and calm only when left alone. -- Alan Watts
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But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful. -- Alan Watts
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The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe. -- Alan Watts
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To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, "I am listening to this music," you are not listening. -- Alan Watts
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Think about a piece of music - some great symphony - we don't expect it to get better as it develops, or that its whole purpose is to reach the final crescendo. The joy is found in listening to the music in each moment. -- Alan Watts
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Self-improvement is a dangerous form of vanity. -- Alan Watts
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The habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism: to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns. -- Alan Watts
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Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart. -- Alan Watts
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What we need to realize is that there can be, shall we say, a movement, a stirring among people, which can be organically designed instead of politically designed. -- Alan Watts
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There's an interdependence between flowers and bees. Where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees, there are no flowers. They are really one organism. And so in the same way, everything in nature depends on everything else. -- Alan Watts
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What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself. -- Alan Watts
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Conscious attention is a designed function of the brain
which scans the environment for any trouble making changes.
If you identify yourself with your trouble shooter, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety. -- Alan Watts
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For thousands of years human history has been a magnificently futile conflict, a wonderfully staged panorama of triumphs and tragedies based on the resolute taboo against admitting that black goes with white. -- Alan Watts
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We live in a culture where it has been rubbed into us in every conceivable way that to die is a terrible thing. And that is a tremendous disease from which our culture in particular suffers. -- Alan Watts
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For since there is no real 'way' to sartori, the way you are following makes very little difference. -- Alan Watts
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I too realize that the less I preach the more likely I am to be heard. -- Alan Watts
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The only serious side-effect of # marijuana is that you might get arrested. -- Alan Watts
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To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play. -- Alan Watts
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Everyone is the fabric and structure of existence. -- Alan Watts
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The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity. -- Alan Watts
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Different Chinese philosophers, writing probably in 5-4 centuries B.C., presented some major ideas and a way of life that are nowadays known under the name of Taoism, the way of correspondence between man and the tendency or the course of natural world. -- Alan Watts
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Don't hurry anything. Don't worry about the future. Don't worry about what progress you're making. Just be entirely content to be aware of what is. -- Alan Watts
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Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence. -- Alan Watts
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Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it's just doing it. -- Alan Watts
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Once you've learned to think you can't stop. And an enormous number of people devote their lives to keeping their minds busy and feel extremely uncomfortable with silence. -- Alan Watts
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A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world. -- Alan Watts
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If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly. -- Alan Watts
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The destination of life is this eternal moment. -- Alan Watts
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We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves. -- Alan Watts
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Any systems approaching perfect self-control also approaches perfect self-frustration. -- Alan Watts
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What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born. -- Alan Watts
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To go out of your mind at least once a day is tremendously important. By going out of your mind, you come to your senses. -- Alan Watts
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Enlightenment remains unrealized so long as it is considered as a specific
state to be attained, and for which there are standards of success. -- Alan Watts
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We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin. -- Alan Watts
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The soul is something which contains the body. The body doesn't contain the soul. The soul, if we put it into modern language, is the entire complex of relationships in whose context this organism exists. -- Alan Watts
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Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. -- Alan Watts
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The Highest to which people can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes them wonder, let them be content; nothing higher can it give them, and nothing further should they seek for behind it; there is the limit. -- Alan Watts
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A person who thinks too much only ever thinks about his thoughts -- Alan Watts
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Duality is always secretly unity. -- Alan Watts
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Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it. -- Alan Watts
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The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention. -- Alan Watts
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Your soul isn't in your body; your body is in your soul! -- Alan Watts
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The truth is revealed by removing things that stand in its light, an art not unlike sculpture, in which the artist creates, not by building, but by hacking away. -- Alan Watts
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But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies. -- Alan Watts
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A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with Reality, and lives in a world of illusion. -- Alan Watts
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If we live, we live; if we die, we die; if we suffer, we suffer; if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it. -- Alan Watts
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It's so important to consider this question: What do I desire? -- Alan Watts
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Nets, grids, and other types of calculus. -- Alan Watts
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Everything is perpetually becoming new. -- Alan Watts
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We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us. -- Alan Watts
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How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god. -- Alan Watts
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Where does my fist go when I open up my hand? Where does my lap go when I stand up? -- Alan Watts
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Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver. -- Alan Watts
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This-the immediate, everyday, and present experience-is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe. -- Alan Watts
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If you insist on being determined by the past that's your game, but the fact of the matter is it all starts right now. -- Alan Watts
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Buddhism ... is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or "loyal opposition" to the culture in which it is involved. -- Alan Watts
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No worthwhile life can be lived without risks, despite current American superstitions to the contrary ... -- Alan Watts
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You must not be afraid of playing wrong notes. Just forget it, play it wrong! But play! -- Alan Watts
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If we are not totally blind, what we are seeking is already here. This is it. -- Alan Watts
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The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens. -- Alan Watts
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The Art of Being: A state of wholeness in which the mind functions freely and easily, without the sensation of a second mind or ego standing over it with a club. -- Alan Watts
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But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything. -- Alan Watts
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The hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests. -- Alan Watts
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For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method. -- Alan Watts
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Black implies white self implies other -- Alan Watts
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We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain. -- Alan Watts
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You can't have something without nothing. -- Alan Watts
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When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was. -- Alan Watts
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Do you have any control over being conscious? Do you know how you will? -- Alan Watts
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In Zen, poverty is voluntary, and considered not really as poverty so much as simplicity, freedom, unclutteredness. -- Alan Watts
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You will begin to realize that if you contemplate long enough on the leaf of the flower, that it involves the whole universe. -- Alan Watts
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The 'you' who you think you are does not exist. -- Alan Watts
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The mind's the standard of the man. -- Alan Watts
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A paradox is only a truth standing on its head to attract attention. -- Alan Watts
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The more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually killing what we love. -- Alan Watts
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That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality. -- Alan Watts
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Faith is a state of openness or trust. -- Alan Watts
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You don't need to try to be God, you are! But if you try to be God it means you don't know you are. -- Alan Watts
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You find out that the universe is a system that creeps up on itself and says 'Boo' and then laughs at itself for jumping. -- Alan Watts