Quote

When you really understand that you are what you see and know, you do not run around the countryside thinking, I am all this! There is simply all this.

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
Simply
Understand
Running
Around
Really
Thinking
Countryside

More quotes by Alan Watts

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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.
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But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.
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They are enlightened who join in this play knowing it as play, for people suffer only because they take as serious what the gods made for fun.
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Nothing fails like success—because the self-imposed task of our society and all its members is a contradiction: to force things to happen which are acceptable only when they happen without force.
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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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Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.
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You know that if you get in the water and have nothing to hold on to, but try to behave as you would on dry land, you will drown. But if, on the other hand, you trust yourself to the water and let go, you will float. And this is exactly the situation of faith.
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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.
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At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but do not seem to make a problem of it.
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The soul is something which contains the body. The body doesn't contain the soul. The soul, if we put it into modern language, is the entire complex of relationships in whose context this organism exists.
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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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If we live, we live if we die, we die if we suffer, we suffer if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it.
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The fools standpoint is that all social institutions are games. He sees the whole world as game playing. That's why, when people take their games seriously and take on stern and pious expressions, the fool gets the giggles because he knows that it is all a game.
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I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.
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Your soul isn't in your body your body is in your soul!
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One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.
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The Tao belongs neither to knowing nor not knowing. Knowing is false understanding not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it's like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?
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Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.
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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.
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I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
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