Alan Watts Quotes - Page 19

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• To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.

  Alan Watts

  Purple, Feelings, Insecurity

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• A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.

  Alan Watts

  Education, Learning, Buddhism

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• Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars.

  Alan Watts

  Stars, Moon, Reality

  Alan Watts (2003). “Become what You are”, p.126, Shambhala Publications

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• But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is. If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death - or shall I say, death implies life - you can conceive yourself.

  Alan Watts

  Self, White, Black

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• And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.

  Alan Watts

  Attitude, Opposites, Belief

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• ...[W]ords can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.

  Alan Watts

  Share

  Alan W. Watts (2011). “The Way of Zen”, p.19, Vintage

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• The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.

  Alan Watts

  Money, Thinking, People

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• The agnostic, the skeptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy; it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself. The intellectual who tries to escape from neurosis by escaping from the facts is merely acting on the principle that “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.

  Alan Watts

  Wise, Philosophy, Ignorance

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• How could you say the best form of government is a republic if you think the universe is a monarchy?

  Alan Watts

  Thinking, Government, Republic

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• If the human race develops an electronic nervous system, outside the bodies of individual people, thus giving us all one mind and one global body, this is almost precisely what has happened in the organization of cells which compose our own bodies. We have already done it. [...] If all this ends with the human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns, why should that trouble us? For that is exactly what we are now!

  Alan Watts

  Race, Cells, Organization

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.34, Souvenir Press

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• Philosophers, for example, often fail to recognize that their remarks about the universe apply also to themselves and their remarks. If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so.

  Alan Watts

  Example, Philosopher, Failing

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• As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses.

  Alan Watts

  Philosophy, Flower, Eagles

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.18, Souvenir Press

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• The police have enough work to keep them busy regulating automobile traffic, preventing robberies and crimes of violence and helping lost children and little old ladies find their way home. As long as the police confine themselves to such activities they are respected friends of the public. But as soon as they begin inquiring into people's private morals, they become nothing more than armed clergymen.

  Alan Watts

  Children, Home, Long

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• The individual may be understood as one particular focal point at which the whole universe expresses itself - as an incarnation of the self, or of the Godhead, or whatever one may choose to call it.

  Alan Watts

  Self, May, Spirituality

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.56, Souvenir Press

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• The sense of wrong is simply failure to see where something fits into a pattern, to be confused as to the hierarchical level upon which an event belongs.

  Alan Watts

  Inspiring, Confused, Events

  Alan W. Watts, Daniel Pinchbeck (2013). “The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness”, p.58, New World Library

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• There are two specific objections to use of psychedelic drugs.First,use of these drugs may be dangerous.Howev er,every worth-while exploration is dangerous-climb ing mountains,testi ng aircraft,rocket ing into outer space,or collecting botanical specimens in jungles.But if you value knowledge & the actual delight of exploration more than mere duration of uneventful life,you are willing to take the risks.

  Alan Watts

  Two, Space, Risk

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• What are we saying when we say now, something is holy? That means you should take a different attitude to what you are doing than if you were, for example, doing it for kicks.

  Alan Watts

  Attitude, Mean, Example

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• Sex is no longer a serious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more about it than adults.

  Alan Watts

  Sex, Teenager, Adults

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.5, Souvenir Press

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• We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

  Alan Watts

  Differentiation, Happens

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• The mind's the standard of the man.

  Alan Watts

  Men, Mind, He Man

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• In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.

  Alan Watts

  America, People, United States

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• Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.

  Alan Watts

  Buddhism, Law, Ideas

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• Someone once described “Christian Secularism” as the assumption that there is nothing at all to life except a pilgrimage between the maternity ward and the crematorium, and that it is within that span that Christian concern must be exercised because that is all there is.

  Alan Watts

  Maternity, Happens

  "Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks: 1960-1969".

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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

  Inspirational, Believe, Parent

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• Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair.

  Alan Watts

  Cat, Violin, Scraping

  Alan Watts (2010). “What Is Tao?”, p.89, New World Library

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