Alan Watts Quotes - Page 8

Quotes about:

• It's time to question a job or career move when it seems like most energy is devoted to making things appear other than what they really are.

  Alan Watts

  Jobs, Moving, Careers

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• For if you know what you want, and will be content with it, you can be trusted. But if you do not know, your desires are limitless and no one can tell how to deal with you. Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.

  Alan Watts

  Desire, Want, Limitless

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.78, Souvenir Press

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• In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.

  Alan Watts

  World, Forget

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• Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.

  Alan Watts

  Motivational, Art, Animal

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.7, Souvenir Press

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• The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

  Alan Watts

  Focus, Ego, Attention

  Alan Watts (2017). “Out of Your Mind: Tricksters, Interdependence, and the Cosmic Game of Hide and Seek”, p.21, Sounds True

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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.

  Alan Watts

  Order, Bridges, Insane

  Alan W. Watts, Daniel Pinchbeck (2013). “The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness”, p.84, New World Library

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• Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed will be far less destructive, because the aggressor will be careful not to destroy what he is fighting to capture. Reasonable - that is, human - men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life.

  Alan Watts

  War, Fighting, Simple

  "The Way of Zen".

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• Everybody should do in their lifetime, sometime, two things. One is to consider death...to observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up-never. That is a most gloomy thing for contemplation; it's like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative of creating life. You'll get wonderful things out of that.

  Alan Watts

  Sleep, Acceptance, Skeletons

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• What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born.

  Alan Watts

  Sleep, Wake Up, Gone

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• We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision. But if a decision itself were voluntary every decision would have to be preceded by a decision to decide - An infinite regression which fortunately does not occur. Oddly enough, if we had to decide to decide, we would not be free to decide

  Alan Watts

  Decision, Doe, Our Actions

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

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• For when you see that the universe cannot be distinguished from how you act upon it, there is neither fate nor free will, self nor other. There is simply one all-inclusive Happening, in which your personal sensation of being alive occurs in just the same way as the river flowing and the stars shining far out in space. There is no question of submitting or accepting or going with it, for what happens in and as you is no different from what happens as it.

  Alan Watts

  Stars, Fate, Self

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• Imagine a multidimensiona l spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image.

  Alan Watts

  Buddhist, Morning, Reflection

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• For the perfect accomplishment of any art, you must get this feeling of the eternal present into your bones - for it is the secret of proper timing. No rush. No dawdle. Just the sense of flowing with the course of events in the same way that you dance to music, neither trying to outpace it nor lagging behind. Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.

  Alan Watts

  Art, Accomplishment, Perfect

  Alan W. Watts (2010). “Does It Matter?: Essays on Man s Relation to Materiality”, p.32, New World Library

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• We think that the world is limited and explained by its past. We tend to think that what happened in the past determines what is going to happen next, and we do not see that it is exactly the other way around! What is always the source of the world is the present; the past doesn't explain a thing. The past trails behind the present like the wake of a ship and eventually disappears.

  Alan Watts

  Past, Thinking, World

  Alan Watts (2010). “What Is Zen?”, p.48, New World Library

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• To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.

  Alan Watts

  Motivational, Play, Done

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.89, Souvenir Press

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• Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—-to the “conquest” of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.

  Alan Watts

  Intelligent, Technology, Men

  Alan W. Watts, Daniel Pinchbeck (2013). “The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness”, p.112, New World Library

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• It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

  Alan Watts

  Language, Description, Hard

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.24, Souvenir Press

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• We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.

  Alan Watts

  Art, Thinking, Ideas

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• There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.

  Alan Watts

  Life, Frustration, Self

  "The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety". Book by Alan Watts, 1951.

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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

  Rate

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• A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.

  Alan Watts

  People, Intellectual, Philosopher

  Alan Watts (2011). “Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks: 1960-1969”, p.73, New World Library

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• The further and further we look out with our telescopes and the further and further we look in with our microscopes, the larger and larger and smaller and smaller the universe becomes in order to escape the investigation because we are the universe looking at itself.

  Alan Watts

  Order, Looks, Telescopes

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• Change is an illusion because we're always at the place where any future can take us.

  Alan Watts

  Illusion

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• How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment - from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies - how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?

  Alan Watts

  Motivational, Eye, Jewels

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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

  Inspiring, Forever, Gone

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