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 WATTSTo 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.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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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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Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.
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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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Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
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Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
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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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Only doubtful truths need defense.
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Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.
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The past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
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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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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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I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.
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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.
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Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.
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The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security.
ALAN WATTS