Quote

The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance. Like music also, it is fulfilled in each moment of its course. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meaning of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.

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
Music
Purpose
Finals
Sonatas
Nothing
Moment
Dancing
Finale
Play
Spiritual
Reach
Composers
Writing
Write
Dance
Chord
Things
Moments
Meaning
Chords
Would
Order
Simply
Composer
Like
Ends
Courses
Fulfilled
Also
Course
Final
Sonata

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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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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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The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.
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Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.
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Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time as much as patterns in space.
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The mind's the standard of the man.
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A less 'brainy-culture' would learn to synchronise its body rhythms rather than its clocks.
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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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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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For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.
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Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith-in life, in other people, and in oneself-is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.
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The individual may be understood as one particular focal point at which the whole universe expresses itself - as an incarnation of the self, or of the Godhead, or whatever one may choose to call it.
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...the habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism: to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns.
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A living body is not a fixed thing, but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool.
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We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.
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No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.
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But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.
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