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We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.
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
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Kent
England
Society
Private
Actually
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Language
Thoughts
Languages
Given
Realize
Invent
Think
Emotion
Seldom
Thinking
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Images
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Emotions
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Inspiring
More quotes by Alan Watts
A holy person is someone who is whole who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites.
Alan Watts
...the habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism: to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns.
Alan Watts
A chest of gold coins or a fat wallet of bills is of no use whatsoever to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft.
Alan Watts
But we must not suffer over the suffering.
Alan Watts
this present moment never comes to be and it never ceases to be, it is simply our minds that construct the continuity of thoughts we call time. In the present moment is nirvana.
Alan Watts
If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives we may forget altogether to live them.
Alan Watts
How could you say the best form of government is a republic if you think the universe is a monarchy?
Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
Thought is a means of concealing Truth.
Alan Watts
A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
Alan Watts
You can't live at all unless you can live fully now.
Alan Watts
Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible.
Alan Watts
To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.
Alan Watts
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
Alan Watts
When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point.
Alan Watts
The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.
Alan Watts
People sometimes fail to live because they are always preparing to live.
Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
