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 WATTSYou didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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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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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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Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
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You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
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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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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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The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually ‘grasp’ reality.
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Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.
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The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
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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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I am what happens between the maternity ward and the Crematorium.
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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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Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.
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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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We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision.
ALAN WATTS