Alan Watts Quotes About Feelings

Quotes about: Feelings

• Man is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock ball that revolves about a small star at the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy. ... I am absolutely amazed to discover myself on this rock ball rotating around a spherical fire. It's a very odd situation. And the more I look at things I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird.

  Alan Watts

  Stars, Science, Men

• It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odduncanny and highly improbable. G.K.Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don't. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things.

  Alan Watts

  Spiritual, Oddities, Feelings

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.7, Souvenir Press

• For the perfect accomplishment of any art, you must get this feeling of the eternal present into your bones - for it is the secret of proper timing. No rush. No dawdle. Just the sense of flowing with the course of events in the same way that you dance to music, neither trying to outpace it nor lagging behind. Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.

  Alan Watts

  Art, Accomplishment, Perfect

  Alan W. Watts (2010). “Does It Matter?: Essays on Man s Relation to Materiality”, p.32, New World Library

• This is what Zen means by being detached—not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.

  Alan Watts

  Mean, Reflection, Water

  Alan Watts (1973). “This is It, and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience”, Vintage

• To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.

  Alan Watts

  Purple, Feelings, Insecurity

• I can only think seriously of trying to live up to an ideal, to improve myself, if I am split in two pieces. There must be a good “I” who is going to improve the bad “me.” “I,” who has the best intentions, will go to work on wayward “me,” and the tussle between the two will very much stress the difference between them. Consequently “I” will feel more separate than ever, and so merely increase the lonely and cut-off feelings which make “me” behave so badly.

  Alan Watts

  Lonely, Stress, Cutting

• In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.

  Alan Watts

  Feelings, Certain

• Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once.

  Alan Watts

  Thinking, Feelings, Deceiving

  Alan Watts (1951). “The Wisdom of Insecurity”, Vintage

• The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens... within I don't know how many years, but in not too long a time, it's going to become basic common sense that you are not some alien being who confronts an external world that is not you, but that almost every intelligent person will have the feeling of being an activity of the entire universe.

  Alan Watts

  Intelligent, Years, Taught Us

• We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a seperate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body-a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange.

  Alan Watts

  People, Feelings, Suffering

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.8, Souvenir Press

• When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be.

  Alan Watts

  Lonely, Feelings, Littles

  Alan Watts (2010). “Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation”, p.90, New World Library

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