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The frightened mind that runs away from everyday terrors meets the seeking mind that wants a better world.

Alan Watts

Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
ALAN WATTS

Attraction Content Inferior Material Package Pleasure Symbol
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
ALAN WATTS

Bite Inspirational Teeth Try Yourself
A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
ALAN WATTS

Inspirational Learning Scholar Student Try
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.
ALAN WATTS

Life Misery Spend
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
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.
ALAN WATTS

Alive Arrive Dead Proverb Travel
The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
ALAN WATTS

Duty God Infinite Religious
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 WATTS

Faith Float Freedom Grab Relaxation Swim Trust Water Yourself
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.
ALAN WATTS

Attempt Avoid Control Deep Exercise Power
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.
ALAN WATTS

Arise Heat Human Love Natural People Sun Time
Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt.
ALAN WATTS

Duty Genius Guilt Knowledge Love Sense
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.
ALAN WATTS

Gone Imagination Night Sleep Wake Up
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
ALAN WATTS

Nature System Trust Yourself
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.
ALAN WATTS

Arrive Dance Discover Life Meditation Nusic Play
I owe my solitude to other people.
ALAN WATTS

One Liner Owe People Solitude
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.
ALAN WATTS

Civilization Meditation People Reality Reason Touch
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
Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
ALAN WATTS

Arrangement Comparison Constellation Look Night Stars Universe
You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
ALAN WATTS

Ocean Physical Universe Wave
It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.
ALAN WATTS

Available Description Indeed Language Notice Reality Words
The ego-self constantly pushes reality away. It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories.
ALAN WATTS

Constant Construction Ego Empty Expectation Future Memories Past Reality Regret
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
The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
ALAN WATTS

Abstraction Future Past Reality
Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once.
ALAN WATTS

Change Deceive Thinking
Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.
ALAN WATTS

Communication Experience Share Words
There is no other reality than present reality.
ALAN WATTS

Life Present Reality
The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
ALAN WATTS

Achievement Alive Life Panic

The frightened mind that runs away from everyday terrors meets the seeking mind that wants a better world.

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The frightened mind that runs away from everyday terrors meets the seeking mind that wants a better world.

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