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But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.
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
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Kent
England
World
Independently
Altogether
External
Pretend
Exists
Trying
More quotes by Alan Watts
Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.
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A scholar tries to learn something everyday a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
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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.
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Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.
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A paradox is only a truth standing on its head to attract attention.
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We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
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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.
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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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Do you see yourself as a victim of the world, or do you see yourself as the world?
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I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution , where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment... only to vanish forever.
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The hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests.
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The wake doesn't drive the ship
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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.
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The animal tends to eat with his stomach, and the man with his brain. When the animal's stomach is full, he stops eating, but the man is never sure when to stop. When he has eaten as much as his belly can take, he still feels empty, he still feels an urge for further gratification.
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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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The harder we try to catch hold of the moment, to seize a pleasant sensation..., the more elusive it becomes... It is like trying to clutch water in one's hands - the harder one grips, the faster it slips through one's fingers.
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The mind's the standard of the man.
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In life as well as in art Zen never wastes energy in stopping to explain it only indicates.
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The only serious side-effect of # marijuana is that you might get arrested.
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