Alan Watts Quotes - Page 8

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• We are seeing, then, that our experience is altogether momentary. From one point of view, each moment is so elusive and so brief that we cannot even think about it before it has gone. From another point of view, this moment is always here, since we know no other moment than the present moment. It is always dying, always becoming past more rapidly than imagination can conceive. Yet at the same time it is always being born, always new, emerging just as rapidly from that complete unknown we call the future. Thinking about it almost makes you breathless.

  Alan Watts

  Time, Past, Thinking

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• The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

  Alan Watts

  Past, Reality, Concrete

  Alan Watts (1989). “The way of Zen”, Vintage

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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.

  Alan Watts

  Order, Bridges, Insane

  Alan W. Watts, Daniel Pinchbeck (2013). “The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness”, p.84, New World Library

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• Western religions are more concerned with behavior, doctrine, and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and our world.

  Alan Watts

  Our World, Doctrine, Way

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• The more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually killing what we love.

  Alan Watts

  Inspiring, Struggle, Killing

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

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• The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.

  Alan Watts

  Inspiring, Wisdom, Joy

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

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• Everybody should do in their lifetime, sometime, two things. One is to consider death...to observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up-never. That is a most gloomy thing for contemplation; it's like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative of creating life. You'll get wonderful things out of that.

  Alan Watts

  Sleep, Acceptance, Skeletons

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• You know that if you get in the water and have nothing to hold on to, but try to behave as you would on dry land, you will drown. But if, on the other hand, you trust yourself to the water and let go, you will float. And this is exactly the situation of faith.

  Alan Watts

  Faith, Letting Go, Hands

  Alan Watts (2011). “Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks: 1960-1969”, p.67, New World Library

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• Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed will be far less destructive, because the aggressor will be careful not to destroy what he is fighting to capture. Reasonable - that is, human - men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life.

  Alan Watts

  War, Fighting, Simple

  "The Way of Zen".

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• We think that the world is limited and explained by its past. We tend to think that what happened in the past determines what is going to happen next, and we do not see that it is exactly the other way around! What is always the source of the world is the present; the past doesn't explain a thing. The past trails behind the present like the wake of a ship and eventually disappears.

  Alan Watts

  Past, Thinking, World

  Alan Watts (2010). “What Is Zen?”, p.48, New World Library

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• We all need to go out of our minds at least once a day.
  When we go out of our minds we quickly come to our senses.

  Alan Watts

  Mind, Needs, Senses

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• Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith-in life, in other people, and in oneself-is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.

  Alan Watts

  Inspiring, Life And Love, Attitude

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

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• Time is a social institution and not a physical reality. There is no such thing as time in the natural world - the world of stars and waters, clouds, mountains and living organisms. There is such a thing as rhythm - rhythm of tides, rhythm of biological processes... There is rhythm and there is motion. Time is a way of measuring motion.

  Alan Watts

  Stars, Reality, Clouds

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• Imagine a multidimensiona l spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image.

  Alan Watts

  Buddhist, Morning, Reflection

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• Zen... does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

  Alan Watts

  Spiritual, Humor, Godly

  "The Way of Zen". Book by Alan Watts, 1957.

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• And the more you become aware of the unknown self - if you become aware of it - the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is.

  Alan Watts

  Self, Realizing, Connected

  Alan Watts (1999). “The Tao of Philosophy”, p.37, Tuttle Publishing

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• For when you see that the universe cannot be distinguished from how you act upon it, there is neither fate nor free will, self nor other. There is simply one all-inclusive Happening, in which your personal sensation of being alive occurs in just the same way as the river flowing and the stars shining far out in space. There is no question of submitting or accepting or going with it, for what happens in and as you is no different from what happens as it.

  Alan Watts

  Stars, Fate, Self

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• You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

  Alan Watts

  Inspiring, Ocean, Wave

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• If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death - or shall I say, death implies life - you can conceive yourself. Not conceive, but feel yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as someone here on sufferance, on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.

  Alan Watts

  Self, White, Black

  "The Nature of Consciousness". Book by Alan Watts, 1960.

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• Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home.

  Alan Watts

  Real, Home, Way

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.31, Souvenir Press

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• Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated

  Alan Watts

  Light, Like Love, Expectations

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• How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment - from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies - how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?

  Alan Watts

  Motivational, Eye, Jewels

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• But we must not suffer over the suffering.

  Alan Watts

  Adversity, Suffering

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• If we live, we live; if we die, we die; if we suffer, we suffer; if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it.

  Alan Watts

  Acceptance, Suffering, Problem

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• There is no coming toward it or going away from it; it is, and you are it.

  Alan Watts

  Going Away

  Alan Watts (2003). “Become what You are”, p.11, Shambhala Publications

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