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If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

Alan Watts

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Alan Watts
Age: 58 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 6
Died: 1973
Died: November 16
Anglican Priest
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Dramaturge
Musician
Philosopher
Theologian
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Kent
England
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More quotes by Alan Watts

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I knew of a physicist at the University of Chicago who was rather crazy like some scientists, and the idea of the insolidity, the instability of the physical world impressed him so much that he used to go around in enormous padded slippers for fear he should fall through the floor.
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I want ... to consort with people whose emotions are not ... cold and standoffish.
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The style of God venerated in church, mosque, and synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.
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The psychotherapist ... tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to be in the world (of social convention) but not of the world.
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The real Zen of the old Chinese masters was wu-shih, or no fuss.
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No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.
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Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had.
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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.
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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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Although profoundly inconsequential, the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied it lends an unmistakable quality to the work.
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So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.
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If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid.
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As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses.
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Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.
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To perceive that form reveals the void, and to see that the void reveals form, is the secret for the overcoming of death. To the extent that one is unaware of space, one is unaware of one's own eternity — it's the same thing!
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You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it.
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If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.
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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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Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
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Of course, you can’t force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flatiron. Water becomes clear and calm only when left alone.
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