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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

More quotes by Alan Watts

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Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it.
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In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.
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Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
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I owe my solitude to other people.
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Man is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock ball that revolves about a small star at the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy. ... I am absolutely amazed to discover myself on this rock ball rotating around a spherical fire. It's a very odd situation. And the more I look at things I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird.
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The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.
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I am amazed that Congressmen can pass a bill imposing severe penalties on anyone who burns the American flag, whereas they are responsible for burning that for which the flag stands: the United States as a territory, as a people, and as a biological manifestation. That is an example of our perennial confusion of symbols with realities.
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Buddhism ... is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or loyal opposition to the culture in which it is involved.
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If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.
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Cows scream louder than carrots.
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Religion is always falling apart.
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Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.
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We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.
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If a flower had a God it would not be a transcendental flower but a field.
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That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality.
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But the disappearance of the effort to let go is precisely the disappearance of the separate thinker, of the ego trying to watch the mind without interfering.
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A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
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A chest of gold coins or a fat wallet of bills is of no use whatsoever to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft.
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I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek.
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The psychotherapist ... tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to be in the world (of social convention) but not of the world.
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