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For a decision-the freest of my actions just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.

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
Bird
Singing
Outside
Inside
Decision
Action
Hiccups
Happens
Freest
Like
Actions

More quotes by Alan Watts

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When death comes, it's just like winter. We don't say, There ought not to be winter. That the winter season, when the leaves fall and the snow comes, is some kind of defeat, something which we should hold out against. No. Winter is part of the natural course of events. No winter, no summer. No cold, no heat.
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Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.
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Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain the most complicated thing in the world, which you yourself grew...without even thinking about it.
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Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap.
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You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
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There is an ineffable mystery that underlies ourselves and the world. It is the darkness from which the light shines. When you recognize the integrity of the universe and that death is as certain as birth, then you can relax and accept that this is the way it is. There is nothing else to do.
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The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.
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Philosophy is man’s expression of curiosity about everything and his attempt to make sense of the world primarily through his intellect.
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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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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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...for thousands of years human history has been a magnificently futile conflict, a wonderfully staged panorama of triumphs and tragedies based on the resolute taboo against admitting that black goes with white.
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Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery.
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There is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion.
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But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
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But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
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Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair.
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What keeps us from happiness is our inability to fully inhabit the present
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The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
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We must be careful that the business we build does not become mere busyness.
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Basically, there is simply nothing to worry about, because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe.
Alan Watts