We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision.
ALAN WATTSReality is only a Rorschach ink-blot.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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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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Faith is an act of trust in the unknown.
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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 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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Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.
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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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The relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.
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A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
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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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When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of, Nothing is left but to love.
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Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
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If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.
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Belief clings, but faith lets go.
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One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.
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Like too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double.
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