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 WATTSA 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.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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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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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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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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Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
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The ego-self constantly pushes reality away. It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories.
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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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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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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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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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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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Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
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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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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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You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
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The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.
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