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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.

Alan Watts

The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
ALAN WATTS

Abstraction Future Past Reality
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.
ALAN WATTS

Experience Mystery Problem Reality Solution
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
ALAN WATTS

Destruction Hand People Process Realize Same Technology Universe
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

Attitude Aware Environment Immense Learning Mirror Ourselves People Power Social Teaching
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
ALAN WATTS

Actual Command Feeling Love Pretend
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
ALAN WATTS

Deep Fun God Man Serious Suffering
There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can’t be said.
ALAN WATTS

Adequate Poetry Talk Words
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.
ALAN WATTS

Discover Explore Home Reason Requirement Schedule Stay Surprise Travel
Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present.
ALAN WATTS

Future Inspirational Night Present Significance
I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.
ALAN WATTS

Ego Finding Sensation Skin
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 WATTS

Final Play Reach Writing
What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously.
ALAN WATTS

Convention Fatal Forget Serious Thinking
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

Bridge Dangerous Insane Life Time
The past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
ALAN WATTS

Existence Future Illusion Past Present Reality
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
ALAN WATTS

Bite Inspirational Teeth Try Yourself
Like too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double.
ALAN WATTS

Alcohol Conscious Ourselves Philosophy

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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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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Popular Authors

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