We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision.
ALAN WATTSTo have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
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The relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.
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The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually ‘grasp’ reality.
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If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.
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If one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.
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You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.
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You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.
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I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.
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What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously.
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To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.
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I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.
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The ego-self constantly pushes reality away. It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories.
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The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.
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If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.
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Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat’s entrails with horsehair.
ALAN WATTS







