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 WATTSWe 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.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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I am what happens between the maternity ward and the Crematorium.
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Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat’s entrails with horsehair.
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Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt.
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Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
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Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.
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Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.
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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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The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
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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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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.
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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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Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
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We confuse money with actual wealth.
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Belief clings, but faith lets go.
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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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Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot.
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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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No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.
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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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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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The menu is not the meal.
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You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.
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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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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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You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
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