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Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair.

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
Violin
Cat
Playing
Entrails
Scraping

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The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events--that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies--and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends.
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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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What we need to realize is that there can be, shall we say, a movement, a stirring among people, which can be organically designed instead of politically designed.
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Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we're not alone.
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Someone once described “Christian Secularism” as the assumption that there is nothing at all to life except a pilgrimage between the maternity ward and the crematorium, and that it is within that span that Christian concern must be exercised because that is all there is.
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You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.
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Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment.
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Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.
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Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be
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Courage is the goal of cowards.
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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.
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If the earth is man's extended body, to be loved and respected as one's own body, those who do no greening of themselves will hardly bring about the greening of America. The idea of 'greening' involves color, flowering, freshness of spring, and, above all, respect for what is organic and vegetative as distinct from the mechanical and metallic.
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That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality.
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Of course, you can’t force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flatiron. Water becomes clear and calm only when left alone.
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In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.
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To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam.
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I would suggest that today, we know about as much concerning the human mind as we knew about the galaxy in 1300.
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The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge. Just as a knife doesn't cut itself, fire doesn't burn itself, light doesn't illuminate itself. It's always an endless mystery to itself.
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But we must not suffer over the suffering.
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...the materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature.
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