Like too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double.
ALAN WATTSOur pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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The present is always changing the past.
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Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat’s entrails with horsehair.
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The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
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Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot.
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The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality.
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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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Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
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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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We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.
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My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern in the water.
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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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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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Faith is an act of trust in the unknown.
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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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Human desire tends to be insatiable.
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I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.
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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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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.
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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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Society is our extended mind and body.
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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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We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision.
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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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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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Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt.
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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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