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 WATTSTrying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.
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Only doubtful truths need defense.
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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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Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
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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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Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present.
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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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You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.
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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.
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The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from the giant pine, which lives for a thousand years.
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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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Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once.
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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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When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.
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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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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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Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
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Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
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No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.
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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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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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Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
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The source of all light is in the eye.
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People can’t be talked out of illusions.
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Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
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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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