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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.

Alan Watts

My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern in the water.
ALAN WATTS

Death Disappear Particular Pattern Water
Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
ALAN WATTS

Delay Hurry Present Resistance Try
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.
ALAN WATTS

Civilization Meditation People Reality Reason Touch
What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.
ALAN WATTS

Discover Finding Imagination Pain Safety Seek
When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of, Nothing is left but to love.
ALAN WATTS

Afraid Darkness Finding Love
It’s better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing, than a long life spent in a miserable way.
ALAN WATTS

Life Misery Spend
Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat’s entrails with horsehair.
ALAN WATTS

Music Play Violin
You 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.
ALAN WATTS

Function Ocean Process Universe Yourself
Only doubtful truths need defense.
ALAN WATTS

Deep Defense Doubt Need One Liner
You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.
ALAN WATTS

Ocean Stranger Wave World
The menu is not the meal.
ALAN WATTS

Food Meal Menu One Liner Philosophy
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.
ALAN WATTS

Alive Arrive Dead Proverb Travel
Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once.
ALAN WATTS

Change Deceive Thinking
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 WATTS

Arrangement Comparison Constellation Look Night Stars Universe
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.
ALAN WATTS

Achievement Alive Life Panic
The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
ALAN WATTS

Abstraction Future Past Reality

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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What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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