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

More quotes by Alan Watts

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For if you know what you want, and will be content with it, you can be trusted. But if you do not know, your desires are limitless and no one can tell how to deal with you. Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.
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That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality.
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A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with Reality, and lives in a world of illusion.
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Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.
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You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
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Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
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To go out of your mind at least once a day is tremendously important. By going out of your mind, you come to your senses.
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Once you've learned to think you can't stop. And an enormous number of people devote their lives to keeping their minds busy and feel extremely uncomfortable with silence.
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If we live, we live if we die, we die if we suffer, we suffer if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it.
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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.
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You find out that the universe is a system that creeps up on itself and says 'Boo' and then laughs at itself for jumping.
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The mind's the standard of the man.
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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.
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But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
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We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time
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...mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.
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You can't get wet from the word 'water.'
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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.
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LSD is simply an exploratory instrument like a microscope or telescope, except this one is inside of you instead of outside of you.
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I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.
Alan Watts