Alan Watts Quotes - Page 11

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• In Zen, poverty is voluntary, and considered not really as poverty so much as simplicity, freedom, unclutteredness.

  Alan Watts

  Simplicity, Poverty

  Alan Watts (2010). “What Is Zen?”, p.84, New World Library

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• Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it's just doing it.

  Alan Watts

  Omnipotence, Knowing, Not Knowing

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• To look at life without words is not to lose the ability to form words- to think, remember, and plan. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam. It is the same with thinking, which is really silent talking. It is not, by itself, open to the discovery of anything new, for its only novelties are simply arrangements of old words and ideas.

  Alan Watts

  Thinking, Discovery, Talking

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

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• 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

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• To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.

  Alan Watts

  Running, Pain, Fighting

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

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• Spiritual awakening is the difficult process whereby the increasing realisation that everything is as wrong as it can be flips suddenly into the realisation that everything is as right is it can be. Or better, everything is as It as it can be.

  Alan Watts

  Spiritual, Awakening, Flip

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

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• There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again.

  Alan Watts

  Inspiring, Circles, Watches

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.12, Souvenir Press

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• Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive; survival -going on living- thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it; because it does not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will, to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on.

  Alan Watts

  Circles, Expectations, Survival

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• In Hindu philosophy the whole creation is regarded as the Vishnu Lila, the play of Vishnu. Lila means dance or play. Also in Hindu philosophy, they call the world illusion; and in Latin the root of the word illusion is ludere, to play.

  Alan Watts

  Philosophy, Latin, Mean

  Alan Watts (1977). “The essence of Alan Watts”, Celestial Arts Publishing Company

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• For the world is an ever-elusive and ever-disappointing mirage only from the standpoint of someone standing aside from it—as if it were quite other than himself—and then trying to grasp it. But a third response is possible. Not withdrawal, not stewardship on the hypothesis of a future reward, but the fullest collaboration with the world as a harmonious system of contained conflicts—based on the realization that the only real "I" is the whole endless process.

  Alan Watts

  Real, Trying, Collaboration

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• For if you know what you want, and will be content with it, you can be trusted. But if you do not know, your desires are limitless and no one can tell how to deal with you. Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.

  Alan Watts

  Desire, Want, Limitless

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.78, Souvenir Press

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• It is also in despair of being able to understand or make any productive contribution to the highly organised chaos of our politico-economic system that large numbers of people simply abandon political and social committments. They just let society be taken over by a pattern of organisation which is as self-proliferative as a weed, and whose ends and values are neither human nor instinctive but mechanical.

  Alan Watts

  Weed, Taken, Numbers

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• To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.

  Alan Watts

  Motivational, Play, Done

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.89, Souvenir Press

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• Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.

  Alan Watts

  Jesus, Atheist, Men

  Alan W. Watts (2011). “Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal”, p.147, Vintage

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• There is no mission, nor interest to convert, and yet I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter. We should see at once that the high ideals for which we are killing and regimenting each other are empty and abstract substiutes for the unheeded miracles that surround us - not only in the obvious wonders of nature but also in the overwhelming uncanny fact of mere existence.

  Alan Watts

  Laughter, Believe, Miracle

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• If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.

  Alan Watts

  Black, Calling, World

  Alan W Watts (2012). “Wisdom Of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety”, p.76, Random House

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• Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world — a place where they are one.

  Alan Watts

  Practice, Breathing, Bridges

  Alan Watts (2010). “What Is Zen?”, p.71, New World Library

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• Courage is the goal of cowards.

  Alan Watts

  Goal, Coward

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• At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but do not seem to make a "problem" of it.

  Alan Watts

  Animal, Envy, Simplicity

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

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• There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

  Alan Watts

  Art, Said, Poetry Is

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• There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.

  Alan Watts

  Life, Frustration, Self

  "The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety". Book by Alan Watts, 1951.

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• Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart.

  Alan Watts

  Heart, Air, Space

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

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• It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

  Alan Watts

  Language, Description, Hard

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.24, Souvenir Press

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• Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.

  Alan Watts

  Self, Two, Alcohol

  Alan W. Watts, Daniel Pinchbeck (2013). “The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness”, p.76, New World Library

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• Society is our extended mind and body.

  Alan Watts

  Mind, Body, Mind And Body

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.50, Souvenir Press

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