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For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method.

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
Literate
Articulate
Overcoming
Method
System
Form
Judo

More quotes by Alan Watts

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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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So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.
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Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.
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The anitya doctrine is, again, not quite the simple assertion that the world is impermanent, but rather that the more one grasps at the world, the more it changes.
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Enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy... your entire education has has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.
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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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The menu is not the meal.
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The Art of Being: A state of wholeness in which the mind functions freely and easily, without the sensation of a second mind or ego standing over it with a club.
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What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.
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The hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests.
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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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That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality.
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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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... preliminary accounting, banking and surveying (known as arithmetic, algebra and geometry).
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But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.
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Altough we all realize that monotony is boring, almost every form of industrial work- banking, accounting, mass-producing, service- is monotonous, and most people are paid for simply putting up with monotony
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Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.
Alan Watts
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When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be.
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What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born.
Alan Watts
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Of course, you can’t force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flatiron. Water becomes clear and calm only when left alone.
Alan Watts