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You can't get wet from the word 'water.'

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
Wet
Word
Water

More quotes by Alan Watts

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The Highest to which people can attain is wonder and if the prime phenomenon makes them wonder, let them be content nothing higher can it give them, and nothing further should they seek for behind it there is the limit.
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A less 'brainy-culture' would learn to synchronise its body rhythms rather than its clocks.
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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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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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To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.
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The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
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Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.
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We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.
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Time is a social institution and not a physical reality. There is no such thing as time in the natural world - the world of stars and waters, clouds, mountains and living organisms. There is such a thing as rhythm - rhythm of tides, rhythm of biological processes... There is rhythm and there is motion. Time is a way of measuring motion.
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Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time as much as patterns in space.
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If you want to stay in a state of illusion, stay in it. But you can always wake up.
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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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Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible.
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Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.
Alan Watts
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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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The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings, the past and the future are not as real, but rather more real than the present.
Alan Watts
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If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.
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A living body is not a fixed thing, but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool.
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And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.
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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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