For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.
ALAN WATTSTrying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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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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The menu is not the meal.
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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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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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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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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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I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.
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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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Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
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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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We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.
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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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I am what happens between the maternity ward and the Crematorium.
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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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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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When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of, Nothing is left but to love.
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Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.
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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 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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You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.
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Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt.
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You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
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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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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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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.
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The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.
ALAN WATTS