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.
ALAN WATTSOther 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.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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People become concerned with being more humble than other people.
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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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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 more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.
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It’s better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing, than a long life spent in a miserable way.
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Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
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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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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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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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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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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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No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
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Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.
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Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
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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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We confuse money with actual wealth.
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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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I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.
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It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.
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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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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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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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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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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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There is no other reality than present reality.
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My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern in the water.
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