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To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.

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
Trying
Resist
Life
Holding
Like
Resistance
Breath
Breaths
Kill
Therefore
Cling
Change
Persist

More quotes by Alan Watts

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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.
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Just what should a young man or woman know to be 'in the know'? Is there, in other words, some inside information, some special taboo, some real lowdown on life and existence that most parents and teachers either don't know or won't tell?
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The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from a giant pine that lives for a thousand years.
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The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security. On the other hand, the more we are forced to admit that we actually live in the real world, the more we feel ignorant, uncertain, and insecure about everything.
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Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive survival -going on living- thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it because it does not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will, to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on.
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A less 'brainy-culture' would learn to synchronise its body rhythms rather than its clocks.
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...the whole universe is through and through the playing of love in every shade of the word's use, from animal lust to divine charity.
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The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually “grasp” reality.
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Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.
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There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it.
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To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.
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Increasingly, we're developing all kinds of systems for verifying reality by echoing it.
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The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.
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But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
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It is the seeker, who understands there is more than what meets the eye, who is not afraid and makes the choice to go into the unknown. The process of awaking has begun, the discovery is underway.
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Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.
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Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated
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Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it.
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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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The Greek word for sinning means to ‘miss the point’ The point is eternal life which is here and now.
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