Quote

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.

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
Love
Allowing
Life
Inspiring
People
Oneself
Attitude
Effort
Faith
Way
Generate
Time
Spontaneous

More quotes by 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.
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When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.
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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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People become concerned with being more humble than other people.
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Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
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Do you have any control over being conscious? Do you know how you will?
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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.
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What would you do if money was no object?
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Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure.
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There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it.
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Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure.
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Beyond positive and negative, what is Reality?
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I too realize that the less I preach the more likely I am to be heard.
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But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.
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Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair.
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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
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Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.
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The destination of life is this eternal moment.
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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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There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.
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