Quote

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.

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
Understand
Preparing
Money
Saving
Live
Fail
Many
Using
Much
Failing
Always
Wealth
People
Enjoy
Making
Enjoying

More quotes by Alan Watts

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The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.
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What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are coins for real thing
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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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To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.
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Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had.
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But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.
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Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain the most complicated thing in the world, which you yourself grew...without even thinking about it.
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Change is an illusion because we're always at the place where any future can take us.
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More and more we try to effect an adaptation to life by means of external gadgets, and attempt to solve our problems by conscious thinking rather than unconscious 'know-how'. This is much less to our advantage than we like to suppose.
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Any systems approaching perfect self-control also approaches perfect self-frustration.
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Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal, for the present moment is infinitely small before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever.
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Our view of reality is like a chart of the sea - the truer it is, the less likely we will become lost.
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You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
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Just as the ocean is waving so each one of us is a waving of the whole cosmos, the entire works, all there is.
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The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.
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We do not come into this world we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.
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The self-styled practical man of affairs who pooh-poohs philosophy as a lot of windy notions is himself a pragmatist or a positivist, and a bad one at that, since he has given no thought to his position.
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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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I have no other self than the totality of the things of which I am aware.
Alan Watts
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Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.
Alan Watts