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Nothing fails like success—because the self-imposed task of our society and all its members is a contradiction: to force things to happen which are acceptable only when they happen without force.
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
Happens
Task
Without
Tasks
Nothing
Members
Self
Failing
Things
Happen
Imposed
Like
Society
Fails
Success
Acceptable
Force
Contradiction
More quotes by Alan Watts
When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there...You're looking at you.
Alan Watts
This is what Zen means by being detached—not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.
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If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives we may forget altogether to live them.
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
The truth is revealed by removing things that stand in its light, an art not unlike sculpture, in which the artist creates, not by building, but by hacking away.
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
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
Alan Watts
The hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests.
Alan Watts
There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied.
Alan Watts
You can't have something without nothing.
Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.
Alan Watts
The real Zen of the old Chinese masters was wu-shih, or no fuss.
Alan Watts
A paradox is only a truth standing on its head to attract attention.
Alan Watts
The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity and it is really impossible to tell whether something that happens in it is good or bad. Because you never know what will be the consequences of the misfortune. Or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.
Alan Watts
The psychotherapist ... tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to be in the world (of social convention) but not of the world.
Alan Watts
The soul is something which contains the body. The body doesn't contain the soul. The soul, if we put it into modern language, is the entire complex of relationships in whose context this organism exists.
Alan Watts
That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality.
Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
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
