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...for thousands of years human history has been a magnificently futile conflict, a wonderfully staged panorama of triumphs and tragedies based on the resolute taboo against admitting that black goes with white.

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
White
Admitting
Magnificently
History
Taboo
Staged
Black
Triumph
Panorama
Human
Thousands
Resolute
Humans
Tragedy
Futile
Years
Conflict
Triumphs
Based
Wonderfully
Goes
Tragedies

More quotes by Alan Watts

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We have allowed brain thinking to develop and dominate our lives. As a consequence, we are at war within ourselves. The brain desiring things which the body does not want, and the body desiring things which the brain does not allow the brain giving directions which the body will not follow, and the body giving impulses which the brain cannot
Alan Watts
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Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.
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This is what Zen means by being detached—not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.
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If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.
Alan Watts
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We usually don't look. We overlook.
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You can't make love without art.
Alan Watts
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And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment.
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We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.
Alan Watts
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But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
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Faith is a state of openness or trust.
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For we have never actually understood the revolutionary sense beneath them – the incredible truth that what religion calls the vision of God is found in giving up any belief in the idea of God.
Alan Watts
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In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.
Alan Watts
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To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.
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Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
Alan Watts
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Where-so-ever beings exist throughout all galaxies, it doesn't make any difference - you are all of them....and when they come into being, that's you coming into being.
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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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What are we saying when we say now, something is holy? That means you should take a different attitude to what you are doing than if you were, for example, doing it for kicks.
Alan Watts
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What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.
Alan Watts
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The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance. Like music also, it is fulfilled in each moment of its course. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meaning of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.
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Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
Alan Watts