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The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.

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
Life
Plain
Obvious
Meaning
Alive
Simple
Inspirational

More quotes by Alan Watts

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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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But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies.
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This is what Zen means by being detached—not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.
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Imagine a multidimensiona l spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image.
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We do not come into this world we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.
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Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done it's just doing it.
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At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but do not seem to make a problem of it.
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But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.
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Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up.
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In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.
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I want ... to consort with people whose emotions are not ... cold and standoffish.
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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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Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery.
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The Highest to which people can attain is wonder and if the prime phenomenon makes them wonder, let them be content nothing higher can it give them, and nothing further should they seek for behind it there is the limit.
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There is a peculiar contradiction in trying to be a member of a republic while believing that the universe is a monarchy.
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...the whole universe is through and through the playing of love in every shade of the word's use, from animal lust to divine charity.
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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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Nothing fails like success—because the self-imposed task of our society and all its members is a contradiction: to force things to happen which are acceptable only when they happen without force.
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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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We all need to go out of our minds at least once a day. When we go out of our minds we quickly come to our senses.
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