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For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.

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
Anywhere
Present
Cannot
Anything
Live
Never

More quotes by Alan Watts

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I have no other self than the totality of the things of which I am aware.
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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.
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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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We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.
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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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As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses.
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When one speaks of awakening, it means de-hypnotizatio n coming to your senses. But of course to do that, you have to go out of your mind.
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Running away from fear is fear fighting pain is pain trying to be brave is being scared
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There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.
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For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method.
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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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...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.
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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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Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.
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To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end.
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And the more you become aware of the unknown self - if you become aware of it - the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is.
Alan Watts
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Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree.
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... preliminary accounting, banking and surveying (known as arithmetic, algebra and geometry).
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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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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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