Quote

To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening.

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
Must
Long
Thinking
Listening
Listen
Understand
Music

More quotes by Alan Watts

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...for since there is no real 'way' to sartori, the way you are following makes very little difference.
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We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
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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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A scholar tries to learn something everyday a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
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But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.
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Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith-in life, in other people, and in oneself-is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.
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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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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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No worthwhile life can be lived without risks, despite current American superstitions to the contrary.
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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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If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives we may forget altogether to live them.
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These people, as far as I can see, do not congregate in the notorious centers of the movement, like the North Beach in San Francisco or Greenwich Village, or Venice, California.
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Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.
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You don't need to try to be God, you are! But if you try to be God it means you don't know you are.
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When death comes, it's just like winter. We don't say, There ought not to be winter. That the winter season, when the leaves fall and the snow comes, is some kind of defeat, something which we should hold out against. No. Winter is part of the natural course of events. No winter, no summer. No cold, no heat.
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The future is a concept, it doesn't exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is always now. That's one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now.
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The Art of Being: A state of wholeness in which the mind functions freely and easily, without the sensation of a second mind or ego standing over it with a club.
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We have a strange anxiety in us that if we don't interfere then it won't happen. Now that's the root of an enormous amount of trouble.
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Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
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No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.
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