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Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.

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
Better
Long
Way
Life
Like
Miserable
Spent
Short
Full

More quotes by Alan Watts

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The agnostic, the skeptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself. The intellectual who tries to escape from neurosis by escaping from the facts is merely acting on the principle that “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.
Alan Watts
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If you want to stay in a state of illusion, stay in it. But you can always wake up.
Alan Watts
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Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery.
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When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
Alan Watts
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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.
Alan Watts
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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.
Alan Watts
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I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek.
Alan Watts
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You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.
Alan Watts
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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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We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.
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The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.
Alan Watts
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The sound of the rain needs no translation. In music one doesn't make the end of the composition the point of the composition... Same way in dancing, you don't aim at one particular spot in the room... The whole point of dancing is the dance.
Alan Watts
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...mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.
Alan Watts
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Running away from fear is fear fighting pain is pain trying to be brave is being scared
Alan Watts
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Do you see yourself as a victim of the world, or do you see yourself as the world?
Alan Watts
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The 'you' who you think you are does not exist.
Alan Watts
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Time is a social institution and not a physical reality. There is no such thing as time in the natural world - the world of stars and waters, clouds, mountains and living organisms. There is such a thing as rhythm - rhythm of tides, rhythm of biological processes... There is rhythm and there is motion. Time is a way of measuring motion.
Alan Watts
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Basically, there is simply nothing to worry about, because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe.
Alan Watts
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They are enlightened who join in this play knowing it as play, for people suffer only because they take as serious what the gods made for fun.
Alan Watts
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The Art of Being: A state of wholeness in which the mind functions freely and easily, without the sensation of a second mind or ego standing over it with a club.
Alan Watts