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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.

Alan Watts

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.
ALAN WATTS

Faith Float Freedom Grab Relaxation Swim Trust Water Yourself
Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.
ALAN WATTS

Humanity Humor Knowledge Laugh Oneself
Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
ALAN WATTS

Book Consume Currency Eat Life Money Paper Real Scripture Wealth
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.
ALAN WATTS

Faith Float Freedom Grab Relaxation Swim Trust Water Yourself
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.
ALAN WATTS

Conscious Glory Listen Magnificant Perceive Universe Witness
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
ALAN WATTS

Deep Fun God Man Serious Suffering
The past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
ALAN WATTS

Existence Future Illusion Past Present Reality
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.
ALAN WATTS

Gone Imagination Night Sleep Wake Up
Like too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double.
ALAN WATTS

Alcohol Conscious Ourselves Philosophy
One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.
ALAN WATTS

Deal Freedom Guilt Perfection Worry
I am what happens between the maternity ward and the Crematorium.
ALAN WATTS

Happen Maternity Sarcastic
Belief clings, but faith lets go.
ALAN WATTS

Belief Faith Let Go One Liner
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.
ALAN WATTS

Final Play Reach Writing
Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt.
ALAN WATTS

Duty Genius Guilt Knowledge Love Sense
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.
ALAN WATTS

Arrangement Deal Experience Hospital Interesting Learning Sick
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.
ALAN WATTS

Arrive Dance Discover Life Meditation Nusic Play
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
ALAN WATTS

Persistent Philosophy Problem Question Suspect Wrong
The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
ALAN WATTS

Duty God Infinite Religious
The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
ALAN WATTS

Abstraction Future Past Reality
Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat’s entrails with horsehair.
ALAN WATTS

Music Play Violin
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.
ALAN WATTS

Alone Certain Deep exchange Isolation Joy Life Live Security Words World
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.
ALAN WATTS

Function Ocean Process Universe Yourself
Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
ALAN WATTS

Aline Clear Deep Inspirational Mud Patience Process Water
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.
ALAN WATTS

Experience Mystery Problem Reality Solution
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.
ALAN WATTS

Anxiety Dead Each Other Equality Laugh Priest Religion Transformation
Human desire tends to be insatiable.
ALAN WATTS

Desire Human One Liner
Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
ALAN WATTS

Arrangement Comparison Constellation Look Night Stars Universe

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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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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