Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.
ALAN WATTSYou 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.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
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You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meanings of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.
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If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.
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This is the real secret of life – to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
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The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
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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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The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security.
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For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.
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Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.
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Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
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To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead, for as our own proverb says, To travel well is better than to arrive.
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The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.
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I am what happens between the maternity ward and the Crematorium.
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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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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.
ALAN WATTS