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If we live, we live if we die, we die if we suffer, we suffer if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it.

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
Live
Terrified
Acceptance
Suffer
Dies
Suffering
Problem

More quotes by Alan Watts

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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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Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree.
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No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
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Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
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A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
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Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.
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Our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don't learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life.
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You can't figure out the Universe, especially if you're using figures to figure it.
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Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
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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.
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When you really understand that you are what you see and know, you do not run around the countryside thinking, I am all this! There is simply all this.
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The life of Zen begins, therefore, in a disillusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really exist the good without the bad, the gratification of a self which is no more than an idea, and the morrow which never comes.
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So many people of wealth understand much more about making and saving money than about using and enjoying it. They fail to live because they are always preparing to live.
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What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.
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As muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone, it could be argued that those who sit quietly and do nothing are making one of the best possible contributions to a world in turmoil.
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I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.
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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.
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More and more we try to effect an adaptation to life by means of external gadgets, and attempt to solve our problems by conscious thinking rather than unconscious 'know-how'. This is much less to our advantage than we like to suppose.
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I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek.
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Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.
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