Quote

The secret of the enjoyment of pleasure is to know when to stop. Man doesn't learn this secret easily, but to shun pleasure altogether is cowardly avoidance of a difficult job. For we have to learn the art of enjoying things BECAUSE they are impermanent.

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
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Kent
England
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Enjoyment
Doesn
Easily
Art
Stop
Impermanent
Things
Pleasure
Shun
Men
Secret
Avoidance
Enjoy
Cowardly
Learn
Altogether
Difficult
Enjoying

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How did you know you're alive, unless you'd once been dead?
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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 insist on being determined by the past that's your game, but the fact of the matter is it all starts right now.
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Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.
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We know that from time to time there arise among human beings people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.
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It's time to question a job or career move when it seems like most energy is devoted to making things appear other than what they really are.
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You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.
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Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body, he 'has' a body. Instead of living and loving he 'has' instincts for survival and copulation.
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We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible.
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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.
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Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it.
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In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.
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A holy person is someone who is whole who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites.
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Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.
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The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.
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