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Once you've learned to think you can't stop. And an enormous number of people devote their lives to keeping their minds busy and feel extremely uncomfortable with silence.

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
People
Learned
Uncomfortable
Stop
Keeping
Lives
Enormous
Feel
Busy
Feels
Minds
Mind
Number
Think
Silence
Devote
Thinking
Numbers
Extremely

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Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair.
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Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.
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No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
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The best way to convince someone is by making him realize that what you speak came from his own mind.
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The sound of the rain needs no translation.
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The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity and it is really impossible to tell whether something that happens in it is good or bad. Because you never know what will be the consequences of the misfortune. Or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.
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The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.
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...[W]ords can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.
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No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.
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The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.
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The question is not what I should do in the future to get it, but rather, what am I presently doing that prevents me from realizing it right now?
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We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.
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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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For a decision-the freest of my actions just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.
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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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Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.
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Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.
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By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us.
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The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from a giant pine that lives for a thousand years.
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The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
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