Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
ALAN WATTSIf, 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.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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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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My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern in the water.
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Human desire tends to be insatiable.
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Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.
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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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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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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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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.
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Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
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For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.
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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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Only doubtful truths need defense.
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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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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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The source of all light is in the eye.
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I owe my solitude to other people.
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If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself – so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed
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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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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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Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
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A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
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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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The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from the giant pine, which lives for a thousand years.
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The present is always changing the past.
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When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.
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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.
ALAN WATTS