Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot.
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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You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.
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We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we’re in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back form the present.
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The menu is not the meal.
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If 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.
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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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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.
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I am what happens between the maternity ward and the Crematorium.
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What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously.
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The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.
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What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.
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When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
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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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Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
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The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security.
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The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.
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Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
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The relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.
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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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The ego-self constantly pushes reality away. It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories.
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Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.
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I owe my solitude to other people.
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It’s better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing, than a long life spent in a miserable way.
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Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
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The past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
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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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Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated.
ALAN WATTS