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

More quotes by Alan Watts

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Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive survival -going on living- thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it because it does not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will, to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on.
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Running away from fear is fear fighting pain is pain trying to be brave is being scared
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When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be.
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All I'm saying is that minerals are just a rudimentary form of consciousness whereas the other people are saying that consciousness is a complicated form of minerals.
Alan Watts
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The world is a marvelous system of wiggles.
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Any systems approaching perfect self-control also approaches perfect self-frustration.
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We do not come into this world we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean waves, the universe peoples. Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.
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Faith is a state of openness or trust.
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To be alive spiritually man must have union with God and must be conscious of it. Apart from this union his religious life will be an empty drudgery, a mere imitation of true spirituality.
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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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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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You can't make love without art.
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To remain caught up in ideas and words about Zen is, as the old masters say, to stink of Zen.
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We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.
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The hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests.
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But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.
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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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To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely one with this universe.
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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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Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.
Alan Watts