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.
ALAN WATTSLike too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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There is no other reality than present reality.
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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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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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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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Belief clings, but faith lets go.
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Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
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Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
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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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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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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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If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.
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Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once.
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When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.
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No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.
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The frightened mind that runs away from everyday terrors meets the seeking mind that wants a better world.
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You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.
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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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If one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.
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If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.
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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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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.
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Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.
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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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Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat’s entrails with horsehair.
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The present is always changing the past.
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The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
ALAN WATTS