What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously.
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 feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision.
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The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
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A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
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Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
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Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.
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Society is our extended mind and body.
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People become concerned with being more humble than other people.
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I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.
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You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.
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We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we’re in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back form the present.
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Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
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Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.
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Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.
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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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The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.
ALAN WATTS