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Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment.

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
Trust
External
Grows
Pretending
Lives
Guidance
Need
Passionate
Many
Judgment
Needs
Authority
Never
Stay
People
Grow

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You can't have something without nothing.
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But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
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Although profoundly inconsequential, the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied it lends an unmistakable quality to the work.
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Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
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The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events--that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies--and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends.
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A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
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The secret of the enjoyment of pleasure is to know when to stop. Man doesn't learn this secret easily, but to shun pleasure altogether is cowardly avoidance of a difficult job. For we have to learn the art of enjoying things BECAUSE they are impermanent.
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For if you know what you want, and will be content with it, you can be trusted. But if you do not know, your desires are limitless and no one can tell how to deal with you. Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.
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When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing but things.
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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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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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The more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually killing what we love.
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Sexual love is a troubled and problematic relationship in cultures where there is a strong sense of man's separation from nature, especially when the realm of nature is felt to be inferior or contaminated with evil.
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But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
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If a flower had a God it would not be a transcendental flower but a field.
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