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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.

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
Past
Power
Expectations
Human
Beings
Humans
Motivational
Real
Memories
Life
Present
Rather
Future

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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.
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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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Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap.
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And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment.
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I want ... to consort with people whose emotions are not ... cold and standoffish.
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I knew of a physicist at the University of Chicago who was rather crazy like some scientists, and the idea of the insolidity, the instability of the physical world impressed him so much that he used to go around in enormous padded slippers for fear he should fall through the floor.
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There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.
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There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied.
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And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.
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To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening.
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The biggest ego trip is getting rid of your ego, and of course the joke of it all is that your ego does not exist.
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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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Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home.
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For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.
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The trouble with many religions, accused of wishful thinking, is that they are not wishful enough. They show a deplorable lack of imagination.
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For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method.
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There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.
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The world is in an extremely dangerous situation, and serious diseases often require the risk of a dangerous cure like the Pasteur serum for rabies.
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When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point.
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How did you know you're alive, unless you'd once been dead?
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