What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously.
ALAN WATTSIf happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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Like too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double.
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I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.
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Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
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Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
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Human desire tends to be insatiable.
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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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Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
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Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
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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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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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Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.
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You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.
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Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
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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.
ALAN WATTS -
The menu is not the meal.
ALAN WATTS