Quote

The harder we try to catch hold of the moment, to seize a pleasant sensation..., the more elusive it becomes... It is like trying to clutch water in one's hands - the harder one grips, the faster it slips through one's fingers.

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
Hold
Sensation
Becomes
Slips
Water
Sensations
Moment
Catch
Moments
Pleasant
Grips
Hands
Faster
Clutch
Trying
Fingers
Seize
Like
Harder
Elusive

More quotes by Alan Watts

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We live in a culture where it has been rubbed into us in every conceivable way that to die is a terrible thing. And that is a tremendous disease from which our culture in particular suffers.
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Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body, he 'has' a body. Instead of living and loving he 'has' instincts for survival and copulation.
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We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
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A scholar tries to learn something everyday a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
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The destination of life is this eternal moment.
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This-the immediate, everyday, and present experience-is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.
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You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.
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You can't live at all unless you can live fully now.
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Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
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...the habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism: to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns.
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So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.
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The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings, the past and the future are not as real, but rather more real than the present.
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The role of the Guru is to show the person that he already has what he is looking for.
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Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
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To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.
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No one's mouth is big enough to utter the whole thing.
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The Universe is the game of the self, which plays hide and seek forever and ever.
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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.
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The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
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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.
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