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.
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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A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
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Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.
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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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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 find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.
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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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I owe my solitude to other people.
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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.
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Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
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The present is always changing the past.
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Like too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double.
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Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
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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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Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt.
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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.
ALAN WATTS