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We usually don't look. We overlook.

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
Looks
Overlook
Usually
Journey
Spiritual
Look

More quotes by Alan Watts

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If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid.
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The menu is not the meal.
Alan Watts
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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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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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Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
Alan Watts
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Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
Alan Watts
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The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is
Alan Watts
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It is interesting that Hindus, when they speak of the creation of the universe do not call it the work of God, they call it the play of God, the Vishnu lila, lila meaning play. And they look upon the whole manifestation of all the universes as a play, as a sport, as a kind of dance — lila perhaps being somewhat related to our word lilt
Alan Watts
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The sense of wrong is simply failure to see where something fits into a pattern, to be confused as to the hierarchical level upon which an event belongs.
Alan Watts
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There is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion.
Alan Watts
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This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
Alan Watts
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Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair.
Alan Watts
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A person who thinks too much only ever thinks about his thoughts
Alan Watts
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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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The sound of the rain needs no translation.
Alan Watts
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I owe my solitude to other people.
Alan Watts
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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.
Alan Watts
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Lack of love for the vegetative, subtle, cthonic, pagan, and sexy aspect of the world means death.
Alan Watts
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We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
Alan Watts
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Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
Alan Watts