Quote

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

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
Around
Inspiring
Overachieving
Great
Necessary
Obviousness
Something
Meaning
Plainness
Life
Beyond
Rushes
Achieve
Panic
Alive
Plain
Everybody
Simplicity
Simple
Obvious

More quotes by Alan Watts

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Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once.
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Running away from fear is fear fighting pain is pain trying to be brave is being scared
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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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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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Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery.
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You don't need to try to be God, you are! But if you try to be God it means you don't know you are.
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The Tao belongs neither to knowing nor not knowing. Knowing is false understanding not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it's like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?
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Altough we all realize that monotony is boring, almost every form of industrial work- banking, accounting, mass-producing, service- is monotonous, and most people are paid for simply putting up with monotony
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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.
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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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If you belong to an in-group of good, or saved, or elite people, you can only know that you’re in because someone else is out. You cannot live on the right side of the tracks without there being a wrong side of the tracks, so you ought to be grateful to the outside for having the privilege of being on the inside.
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You are the universe experiencing itself.
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The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.
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But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
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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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This-the immediate, everyday, and present experience-is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.
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The future is a concept, it doesn't exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is always now. That's one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now.
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For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase—oddly enough—to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization.
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By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us.
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The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings, the past and the future are not as real, but rather more real than the present.
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