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.
ALAN WATTSLife 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.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.
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A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
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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.
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You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.
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What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.
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Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
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My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern in the water.
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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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Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.
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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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Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.
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We know that from time to time, there arise among human beings, people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.
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Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
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In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.
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Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat’s entrails with horsehair.
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A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
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When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
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Faith is an act of trust in the unknown.
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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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You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
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People become concerned with being more humble than other people.
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We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.
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The source of all light is in the eye.
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One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.
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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.
ALAN WATTS