Alan Watts Quotes - Page 12

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• Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain; the most complicated thing in the world, which you yourself grew...without even thinking about it.

  Alan Watts

  Thinking, Light, Smell

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• The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery. We do not realize that our so-called love and concern for the individual is simply the other face of our own fear of death or rejection. In his exaggerated valuation of separate identity, the personal ego is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting, and then getting more and more anxious about the coming crash!

  Alan Watts

  Rejection, Ego, Identity

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.56, Souvenir Press

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• If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead, making it difficult for me to attend to the here and now. If, then , my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.

  Alan Watts

  Buddhist, Memories, Real

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

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• The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation. The head and the feet are different, but not separate, and though man is not connected to the universe by exactly the same physical relation as branch to tree or feet to head, he is nonetheless connected - and by physical relations of fascinating complexity.

  Alan Watts

  Motivational, Men, Feet

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.56, Souvenir Press

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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.

  Alan Watts

  Reality, Purpose, Definitions

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

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• 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.

  Alan Watts

  Art, Thinking, Ideas

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• If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.

  Alan Watts

  Letting Go, Have Faith, Belief

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

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• If you can't meditate in a boiler room, you can't meditate.

  Alan Watts

  Inspiration, Meditation Practice, Boiler Room

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• The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.

  Alan Watts

  Learning, Ignorance, Knowledge

  Alan W Watts (2012). “Wisdom Of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety”, p.98, Random House

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• so, the whole idea, you see, is that everything's falling apart, so don't try and stop it. when you're falling off a precipice, it doesn't do you any good to hang onto a rock that's falling with you. see? but everything is doing that. and so, again, this is another case of our completely wasting our energy in trying to prevent the world from falling apart. don't do it. and then you'll be able to do something interesting with the free energy.

  Alan Watts

  Fall, Rocks, Ideas

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• For every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree. To manifest individuality, every branch must have a sensitive connection with the tree, just as our independently moving and differentiated fingers must have a sensitive connection with the whole body. The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation.

  Alan Watts

  Moving, Unique, Often Is

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.56, Souvenir Press

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• Nothing fails like success—because the self-imposed task of our society and all its members is a contradiction: to force things to happen which are acceptable only when they happen without force.

  Alan Watts

  Self, Tasks, Our Society

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.54, Souvenir Press

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• Lack of love for the vegetative, subtle, cthonic, pagan, and sexy aspect of the world means death.

  Alan Watts

  Death, Sexy, Mean

  Alan W. Watts (2011). “Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal”, p.135, Vintage

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• The Tao belongs neither to knowing nor not knowing. Knowing is false understanding; not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it's like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?

  Alan Watts

  Ignorance, Sky, Knowing

  Alan Watts (2010). “Tao: The Watercourse Way”, p.49, Souvenir Press

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• What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins" for real things.

  Alan Watts

  Real, Ideas, Example

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• What would you do if money was no object?

  Alan Watts

  Objects, Ifs

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• You are something that the whole world is doing just as when the sea has waves on it.

  Alan Watts

  Sea, World, Wave

  Alan Watts (1999). “The Tao of Philosophy”, p.28, Tuttle Publishing

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• I want ... to consort with people whose emotions are not ... cold and standoffish.

  Alan Watts

  People, Want, Emotion

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• If a flower had a God it would not be a transcendental flower but a field.

  Alan Watts

  Flower, Fields, Transcendental

  Alan Watts (2011). “In My Own Way: An Autobiography”, p.169, New World Library

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• I am amazed that Congressmen can pass a bill imposing severe penalties on anyone who burns the American flag, whereas they are responsible for burning that for which the flag stands: the United States as a territory, as a people, and as a biological manifestation. That is an example of our perennial confusion of symbols with realities.

  Alan Watts

  Reality, People, Confusion

  "Individual and Society". Audio lecture,

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• If we are not totally blind, what we are seeking is already here. This is it.

  Alan Watts

  Blind, Seeking, Ifs

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• We live in a culture where it has been rubbed into us in every conceivable way that to die is a terrible thing. And that is a tremendous disease from which our culture in particular suffers.

  Alan Watts

  Suffering, Culture, Disease

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• I was talking to a Zen master the other day and he said, "You shall be my disciple."I looked at him and said, "Who was Buddha's teacher?" He looked at me in a very odd way for a moment and then he burst into laughter and handed me a piece of clover.

  Alan Watts

  Spiritual, Teacher, Laughter

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• Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.

  Alan Watts

  Way, Liberation, Discovering

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• Life and love generate effort but effort will not generate them.

  Alan Watts

  Life And Love, Effort, And Love

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.53, Souvenir Press

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