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Alan Watts

Alan Wilson Watts (January 6, 1915 - November 16, 1973) was a British philosopher, writer, speaker, and student of comparative religion. He was best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Asian philosophies for a Western audience

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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.

– Alan Watts

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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.

– Alan Watts

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Faith is, above all, openess; an act of trust in the unknown.

– Alan Watts

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If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you’ll spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing, which is stupid.

– Alan Watts

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Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal, for the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever….

– Alan Watts

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Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment.

– Alan Watts

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Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.

– Alan Watts

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Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

– Alan Watts

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Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

– Alan Watts

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Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

– Alan Watts

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The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

– Alan Watts

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The menu is not the meal.

– Alan Watts

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The more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love.

– Alan Watts

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The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

– Alan Watts

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There is always something taboo, something repressed, un-admitted, 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.

– Alan Watts

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There will always be suffering. But we must not suffer over the suffering.

– Alan Watts

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This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.

– Alan Watts

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To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.

– Alan Watts

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Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up… now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.

– Alan Watts

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We are not clear as to the role in life of these chemicals; nor are we clear as to the role of the physician. You know, of course, that in ancient times there was no clear distinction between priest and physician.

– Alan Watts

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We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

– Alan Watts

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We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.”

– Alan Watts

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We love to see a child lost in the dance and not performing for an audience. To be happy and know that you are happy is really the overflowing cup of life. To dance as if there was no audience.

– Alan Watts

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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. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them that excrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body. Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules.

– Alan Watts

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