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.
ALAN WATTSYou 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.
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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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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Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home.
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Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat’s entrails with horsehair.
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Society is our extended mind and body.
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A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
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The source of all light is in the eye.
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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.
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The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.
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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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You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
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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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In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it’s all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.
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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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For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.
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The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.
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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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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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My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern in the water.
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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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Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
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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.
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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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The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually ‘grasp’ reality.
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Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
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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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