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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
Identity
Humor
Trying
Like
Bite
Mindfulness
Bites
Define
Teeth

More quotes by Alan Watts

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We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can’t slow down enough to enjoy them when they come.
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Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.
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To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening.
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Everything is perpetually becoming new.
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The real Zen of the old Chinese masters was wu-shih, or no fuss.
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In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.
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There is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion.
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The role of the Guru is to show the person that he already has what he is looking for.
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Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.
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What would you do if money was no object?
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Sex is no longer a serious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more about it than adults.
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And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.
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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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Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap.
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There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it.
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Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair.
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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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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.
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And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.
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You are something that the whole world is doing just as when the sea has waves on it.
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