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Only doubtful truths need defense.

Alan Watts

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
Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.
ALAN WATTS

Communication Experience Share Words
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 WATTS

Difficult Fascinate Frustration Individual Intelligence Oneself Wisdom
Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.
ALAN WATTS

Concentration Look World
The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.
ALAN WATTS

Animal Compassion Love Play World
The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
ALAN WATTS

Abstraction Future Past Reality
We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision.
ALAN WATTS

Action Decision Feeling Follow Happen Voluntary
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
ALAN WATTS

Deep Fun God Man Serious Suffering
The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.
ALAN WATTS

Life Permanent
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 WATTS

Civilization Emotion Example Image Language Private Seldom Society Wisdom
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
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

Anxiety Dead Each Other Equality Laugh Priest Religion Transformation
Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
ALAN WATTS

Book Consume Currency Eat Life Money Paper Real Scripture Wealth
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.
ALAN WATTS

Arrangement Deal Experience Hospital Interesting Learning Sick
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
ALAN WATTS

Actual Command Feeling Love Pretend
You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
ALAN WATTS

Ocean Physical Universe Wave

Only doubtful truths need defense.

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Only doubtful truths need defense.

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