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To remain caught up in ideas and words about Zen is, as the old masters say, to stink of Zen.

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
Remain
Caught
Masters
Words
Ideas
Stink

More quotes by Alan Watts

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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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Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
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You know that if you get in the water and have nothing to hold on to, but try to behave as you would on dry land, you will drown. But if, on the other hand, you trust yourself to the water and let go, you will float. And this is exactly the situation of faith.
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Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible.
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It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.
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Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
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So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.
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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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So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.
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How could you say the best form of government is a republic if you think the universe is a monarchy?
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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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So many people of wealth understand much more about making and saving money than about using and enjoying it. They fail to live because they are always preparing to live.
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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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Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it.
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If you insist on being determined by the past that's your game, but the fact of the matter is it all starts right now.
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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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The harder we try to catch hold of the moment, to seize a pleasant sensation..., the more elusive it becomes... It is like trying to clutch water in one's hands - the harder one grips, the faster it slips through one's fingers.
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Religion is always falling apart.
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Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.
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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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