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.
ALAN WATTSWhat we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern in the water.
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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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We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision.
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Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
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Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
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We know that from time to time, there arise among human beings, people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.
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The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually ‘grasp’ reality.
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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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Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
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Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
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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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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 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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The source of all light is in the eye.
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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