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.
ALAN WATTSA scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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The menu is not the meal.
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Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home.
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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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Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.
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Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot.
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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 feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision.
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The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
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We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we’re in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back form the present.
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The present is always changing the past.
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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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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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Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt.
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Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
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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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Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
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Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once.
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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 we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.
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Like too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double.
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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.
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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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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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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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Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
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It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.
ALAN WATTS