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Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

Alan Watts

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Alan Watts
Age: 58 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 6
Died: 1973
Died: November 16
Anglican Priest
Author
Dramaturge
Musician
Philosopher
Theologian
Videographer
Writer
Kent
England
Trying
Like
Bite
Mindfulness
Bites
Define
Teeth
Identity
Humor

More quotes by Alan Watts

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...mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.
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You can't live at all unless you can live fully now.
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I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.
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The wake doesn't drive the ship
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And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plowshares into swords
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Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.
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Enlightenment remains unrealized so long as it is considered as a specific state to be attained, and for which there are standards of success.
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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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You can't have something without nothing.
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For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method.
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If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.
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When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there...You're looking at you.
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To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end.
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Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body, he 'has' a body. Instead of living and loving he 'has' instincts for survival and copulation.
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Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
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Everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality.
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The life of Zen begins, therefore, in a disillusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really exist the good without the bad, the gratification of a self which is no more than an idea, and the morrow which never comes.
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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?
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We are all as much extraordinary phenomena 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.
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How could you say the best form of government is a republic if you think the universe is a monarchy?
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