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Alan Watts Quotes
Best Quotes by Alan Watts (Top 10)
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What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.
Alan Watts -
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
Alan Watts -
If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid.
Alan Watts -
How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.
Alan Watts -
Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
Alan Watts -
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.
Alan Watts -
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
Alan Watts -
The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
Alan Watts -
Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
Alan Watts -
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
Alan Watts
More Alan Watts Quotes
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We could say that meditation doesn't have a reason or doesn't have a purpose. In this respect it's unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing. When we make music we don't do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. 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.
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I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
Alan Watts -
A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
Alan Watts -
I owe my solitude to other people.
Alan Watts -
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
Alan Watts -
We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.
Alan Watts -
We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.
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Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.
Alan Watts -
Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery — the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets — is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.
Alan Watts -
Faith is, above all, openness; an act of trust in the unknown.
Alan Watts -
The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
Alan Watts -
Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
Alan Watts