Quote

What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are coins for real thing

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
Money
Absurd
Ideas
Seriously
Confuse
Take
Forgotten
Convention
Real
Thoughts
Coins
Way
Wealth
Convenience
Things
Example
Fatal
Words
Conventions
Social
Somewhat

More quotes by Alan Watts

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The secret of the enjoyment of pleasure is to know when to stop. Man doesn't learn this secret easily, but to shun pleasure altogether is cowardly avoidance of a difficult job. For we have to learn the art of enjoying things BECAUSE they are impermanent.
Alan Watts
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The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
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The point is seeing that THIS - the immediate, everyday and present experience - is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe. I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter.
Alan Watts
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Cows scream louder than carrots.
Alan Watts
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People often say to me, 'I understand what you are talking about intellectually, but I don't really feel it, I don't realize it,' and I am apt to reply, 'I wonder whether you do understand it intellectually, because if you did you would also feel it.'
Alan Watts
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The individual may be understood as one particular focal point at which the whole universe expresses itself - as an incarnation of the self, or of the Godhead, or whatever one may choose to call it.
Alan Watts
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What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.
Alan Watts
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You will begin to realize that if you contemplate long enough on the leaf of the flower, that it involves the whole universe.
Alan Watts
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The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is
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What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.
Alan Watts
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Lack of love for the vegetative, subtle, cthonic, pagan, and sexy aspect of the world means death.
Alan Watts
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Religion is always falling apart.
Alan Watts
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When you really understand that you are what you see and know, you do not run around the countryside thinking, I am all this! There is simply all this.
Alan Watts
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Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.
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At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but do not seem to make a problem of it.
Alan Watts
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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!
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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You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.
Alan Watts
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Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
Alan Watts
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Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.
Alan Watts