Quote

Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.

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
Purposes
Become
Remember
Confused
Time
Parts
World
Inspiring
Figure
Figures
Figuring
Exist
Describing
Purpose

More quotes by Alan Watts

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... preliminary accounting, banking and surveying (known as arithmetic, algebra and geometry).
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The style of God venerated in church, mosque, and synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.
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If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.
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The Tao belongs neither to knowing nor not knowing. Knowing is false understanding not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it's like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?
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We tend to regard ourselves as puppets of the Past, driven along by something that is always behind us.
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Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.
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We have a strange anxiety in us that if we don't interfere then it won't happen. Now that's the root of an enormous amount of trouble.
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You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.
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Different Chinese philosophers, writing probably in 5-4 centuries B.C., presented some major ideas and a way of life that are nowadays known under the name of Taoism, the way of correspondence between man and the tendency or the course of natural world.
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Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.
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...the materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature.
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You, yourself, are the eternal energy which appears as this Universe. You didn't come into this world you came out of it. Like a wave from the ocean.
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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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A holy person is someone who is whole who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites.
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Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.
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The Universe is the game of the self, which plays hide and seek forever and ever.
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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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As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses.
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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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Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
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