Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present.
ALAN WATTSOther 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.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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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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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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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.
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Human desire tends to be insatiable.
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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.
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You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.
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Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat’s entrails with horsehair.
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Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
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In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it’s all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.
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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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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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Only doubtful truths need defense.
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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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Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
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The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.
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Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.
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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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Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt.
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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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I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.
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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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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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If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself – so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed
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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 will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.
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We know that from time to time, there arise among human beings, people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.
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