"There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said."
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Quote collection
Alan Watts quotes (page 14 of 25)
499 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed"
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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."
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"To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely one with this universe."
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"Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know."
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"I want ... to consort with people whose emotions are not ... cold and standoffish."
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"Altough we all realize that monotony is boring, almost every form of industrial work- banking, accounting, mass-producing, service- is monotonous, and most people are paid for simply putting up with monotony"
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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."
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"What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do."
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"Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body, he 'has' a body. Instead of living and loving he 'has' instincts for survival and copulation."
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"Sex is no longer a serious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more about it than adults."
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"Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after."
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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."
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"... preliminary accounting, banking and surveying (known as arithmetic, algebra and geometry)."
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"If you can't meditate in a boiler room, you can't meditate."
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"Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them."
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"When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there...You're looking at you."
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"The world is a marvelous system of wiggles."
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"In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life."
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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?"
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