The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from the giant pine, which lives for a thousand years.
ALAN WATTSIf 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.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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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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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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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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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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The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality.
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Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.
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Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.
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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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You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
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Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat’s entrails with horsehair.
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Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
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The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.
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Only doubtful truths need defense.
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Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.
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You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.
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Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
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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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I am what happens between the maternity ward and the Crematorium.
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Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up, now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.
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If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.
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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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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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Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
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There is no other reality than present reality.
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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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No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.
ALAN WATTS