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Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had.

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
Life
Solved
Experience
Reality
Problem

More quotes by Alan Watts

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Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever.
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Although profoundly inconsequential, the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied it lends an unmistakable quality to the work.
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What is the next step, the practical application? —I will answer that the absolutely vital thing is to consolidate your understanding, to become capable of enjoyment, of living in the present, and of the discipline which this involves. Without this you have nothing to give.
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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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Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
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The world is a marvelous system of wiggles.
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To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end.
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The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.
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It is the seeker, who understands there is more than what meets the eye, who is not afraid and makes the choice to go into the unknown. The process of awaking has begun, the discovery is underway.
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The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.
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If a flower had a God it would not be a transcendental flower but a field.
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What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.
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A scholar tries to learn something everyday a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
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It's so important to consider this question: What do I desire?
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But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies.
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You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
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If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.
Alan Watts
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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.
Alan Watts
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The sound of the rain needs no translation. In music one doesn't make the end of the composition the point of the composition... Same way in dancing, you don't aim at one particular spot in the room... The whole point of dancing is the dance.
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But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.
Alan Watts