We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision.
ALAN WATTSWords can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.
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You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.
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Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.
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The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
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There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can’t be said.
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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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If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.
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Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
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You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.
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I owe my solitude to other people.
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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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This is the real secret of life – to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
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Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.
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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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Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present.
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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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Faith is an act of trust in the unknown.
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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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Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat’s entrails with horsehair.
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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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Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
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Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up, now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.
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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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The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from the giant pine, which lives for a thousand years.
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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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