Alan Watts Quotes - Page 3

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• For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, "Now, I've arrived!" Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.

  Alan Watts

  Contentment, Alive, Able

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• We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.

  Alan Watts

  Journey, Heaven, Musical

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• It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.

  Alan Watts

  Acorns, Turns, Take Time

  Alan Watts (2017). “Out of Your Mind: Tricksters, Interdependence, and the Cosmic Game of Hide and Seek”, p.24, Sounds True

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• You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it.

  Alan Watts

  Meditation, Humans, Human Activity

  Alan Watts (2010). “Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation”, p.67, New World Library

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• If you love a person, you say to that person, "Look, I love you, whatever that may be. I've seen quite a bit of it and I know there's lots that I haven't seen, but still it's you and I want you to be what you want to be. And I won't be happy if I've got you in a cage. You'd be a bird without song."

  Alan Watts

  Love, Song, Bird

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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.

  Alan Watts

  Inspiring, Thinking, Example

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.50, Souvenir Press

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• Do you see yourself as a victim of the world, or do you see yourself as the world?

  Alan Watts

  World, Victim, Define Yourself

  "Out of Your Mind: Tricksters, Interdependence, and the Cosmic Game of Hide and Seek".

  39 Copy quote

• Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy and you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, ‘My goodness, I’ve just discovered that I’m God,’ they’ll laugh and say, ‘Oh, congratulations, at last you found out.

  Alan Watts

  Jesus, Crazy, Congratulations

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• Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

  Alan Watts

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Freedom

  Alan W. Watts (2011). “The Way of Zen”, p.157, Vintage

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• Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown.

  Alan Watts

  Suicide, Commitment, Intellectual

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

  Alan Watts

  Love, Good Morning, Sexy

  Alan Watts (2011). “In My Own Way: An Autobiography”, p.189, New World Library

  91 Copy quote

• Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.

  Alan Watts

  Goal, Missing, World

  Alan Watts (1989). “The way of Zen”, Vintage

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• The real you is not a puppet that life pushes around, the real deep down you is the whole universe.

  Alan Watts

  Real, Puppets, Whole

  Alan Watts (1999). “The Tao of Philosophy”, p.36, Tuttle Publishing

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• We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time

  Alan Watts

  Culture, Illusion, Illusion Of Time

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• Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.

  Alan Watts

  Motivational, Reality, Missing

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• Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it.

  Alan Watts

  Where You Are, Objects

  Alan Watts (2017). “Out of Your Mind: Tricksters, Interdependence, and the Cosmic Game of Hide and Seek”, p.89, Sounds True

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• When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was.

  Alan Watts

  Change, World, Way

  Alan Watts (2010). “What Is Zen?”, p.123, New World Library

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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 thing you don't like doing, which is stupid.

  Alan Watts

  Stupid, Order, Important

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• Running away from fear is fear; fighting pain is pain; trying to be brave is being scared

  Alan Watts

  Running, Pain, Fighting

  Alan Watts (1951). “The Wisdom of Insecurity”, Vintage

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

  Alan Watts

  Inspiring, Pain, Mental Health

  Alan Watts (1951). “The Wisdom of Insecurity”, Vintage

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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.

  Alan Watts

  Beautiful, Depressing, Ocean

  Alan Watts (1989). “The way of Zen”, Vintage

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• The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings, the past and the future are not as real, but rather more real than the present.

  Alan Watts

  Life, Motivational, Memories

  Alan W Watts (2012). “Wisdom Of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety”, p.22, Random House

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• For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.

  Alan Watts

  Ifs

  Alan W. Watts (2011). “The Way of Zen”, p.128, Vintage

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• Every explicit duality is an implicit unity.

  Alan Watts

  Unity, Chaos, Duality

  Alan Watts (2017). “Psychotherapy East & West”, p.126, New World Library

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• We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can’t slow down enough to enjoy them when they come.

  Alan Watts

  Rushing, Looking Forward, Enough

  Alan W. Watts (2010). “Does It Matter?: Essays on Man s Relation to Materiality”, p.31, New World Library

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