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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
Writer
Kent
England
Language
Thoughts
Languages
Given
Realize
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Think
Emotion
Seldom
Thinking
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Images
Realizing
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Society
Private
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More quotes by Alan Watts

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The agnostic, the skeptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself. The intellectual who tries to escape from neurosis by escaping from the facts is merely acting on the principle that “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.
Alan Watts
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Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever.
Alan Watts
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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.
Alan Watts
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Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.
Alan Watts
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So many people of wealth understand much more about making and saving money than about using and enjoying it. They fail to live because they are always preparing to live.
Alan Watts
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Perhaps there is no other knowing than the mere competence of the act. If at the heart of one's being, there is no self to which one ought to be true, then sincerity is simply nerve it lies in the unabashed vigor of the pretense. But pretense is only pretense when it is assumed that the act is not true to the agent. Find the agent.
Alan Watts
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Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery.
Alan Watts
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The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually “grasp” reality.
Alan Watts
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... preliminary accounting, banking and surveying (known as arithmetic, algebra and geometry).
Alan Watts
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So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.
Alan Watts
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The real you is not a puppet that life pushes around, the real deep down you is the whole universe.
Alan Watts
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When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.
Alan Watts
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One's life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If one is paranoid, the other is metanoid.
Alan Watts
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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.
Alan Watts
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There is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to get culture or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost.
Alan Watts
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You are something that the whole world is doing just as when the sea has waves on it.
Alan Watts
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As muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone, it could be argued that those who sit quietly and do nothing are making one of the best possible contributions to a world in turmoil.
Alan Watts
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We see what we believe rather than what we see.
Alan Watts
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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.
Alan Watts
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There's an interdependence between flowers and bees. Where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees, there are no flowers. They are really one organism. And so in the same way, everything in nature depends on everything else.
Alan Watts