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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
Solved
Experience
Reality
Problem
Life

More quotes by Alan Watts

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The idea of the Universe being ruled by that marvelous old gentleman, is no longer plausible. It isn't that anybody has disproved it, but it just somehow doesn't go with the vast infinitude of the Universe.
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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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You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.
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Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.
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In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.
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Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.
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Increasingly, we're developing all kinds of systems for verifying reality by echoing it.
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A person who thinks too much only ever thinks about his thoughts
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No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.
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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.
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To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening.
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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 question is not what I should do in the future to get it, but rather, what am I presently doing that prevents me from realizing it right now?
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Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive survival -going on living- thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it because it does not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will, to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on.
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More and more we try to effect an adaptation to life by means of external gadgets, and attempt to solve our problems by conscious thinking rather than unconscious 'know-how'. This is much less to our advantage than we like to suppose.
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What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are coins for real thing
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Life and love generate effort but effort will not generate them.
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I would suggest that today, we know about as much concerning the human mind as we knew about the galaxy in 1300.
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We have a strange anxiety in us that if we don't interfere then it won't happen. Now that's the root of an enormous amount of trouble.
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I too realize that the less I preach the more likely I am to be heard.
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