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We tend to regard ourselves as puppets of the Past, driven along by something that is always behind us.
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
Along
Behind
Past
Something
Puppets
Always
Driven
Tend
Regard
Behinds
More quotes by Alan Watts
There is no coming toward it or going away from it it is, and you are it.
Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.
Alan Watts
Do you have any control over being conscious? Do you know how you will?
Alan Watts
To feel that life is meaningless unless “I” can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch.
Alan Watts
How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.
Alan Watts
When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.
Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
You can't figure out the Universe, especially if you're using figures to figure it.
Alan Watts
Once you've learned to think you can't stop. And an enormous number of people devote their lives to keeping their minds busy and feel extremely uncomfortable with silence.
Alan Watts
The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
Alan Watts
The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.
Alan Watts
Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be
Alan Watts
You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.
Alan Watts
All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head.
Alan Watts
Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.
Alan Watts
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?
Alan Watts
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
The sound of the rain needs no translation. In music one doesn't make the end of the composition the point of the composition... Same way in dancing, you don't aim at one particular spot in the room... The whole point of dancing is the dance.
Alan Watts
The agnostic, the skeptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself. The intellectual who tries to escape from neurosis by escaping from the facts is merely acting on the principle that “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.
Alan Watts
