"We must be careful that the business we build does not become mere busyness."
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Quote collection
Alan Watts quotes (page 20 of 25)
499 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Duality is always secretly unity."
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"But we must not suffer over the suffering."
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"A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted."
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"A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world."
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"If you want to stay in a state of illusion, stay in it. But you can always wake up."
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"The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation. The head and the feet are different, but not separate, and though man is not connected to the universe by exactly the same physical relation as branch to tree or feet to head, he is nonetheless connected - and by physical relations of fascinating complexity."
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"Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever."
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"Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are."
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"How did you know you're alive, unless you'd once been dead?"
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"What is the next step, the practical application? —I will answer that the absolutely vital thing is to consolidate your understanding, to become capable of enjoyment, of living in the present, and of the discipline which this involves. Without this you have nothing to give."
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"But nirvana is a radical transformation of how it feels to be alive: it feels as if everything were myself, or as if everything---including "my" thoughts and actions---were happening of itself. There are still efforts, choices, and decisions, but not the sense that "I make them"; they arise of themselves in relation to circumstances. This is therefore to feel life, not as an encounter between subject and object, but as a polarized field where the contest of opposites has become the play of opposites."
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"Chaos is always losing, but never defeated"
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"Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick."
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"The best way to convince someone is by making him realize that what you speak came from his own mind."
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"I was talking to a Zen master the other day and he said, "You shall be my disciple."I looked at him and said, "Who was Buddha's teacher?" He looked at me in a very odd way for a moment and then he burst into laughter and handed me a piece of clover."
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"The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery. We do not realize that our so-called love and concern for the individual is simply the other face of our own fear of death or rejection. In his exaggerated valuation of separate identity, the personal ego is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting, and then getting more and more anxious about the coming crash!"
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"To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely with this universe. You feel profoundly rooted in it and connected with it. You feel, in other words, that the whole energy, which expresses itself in the galaxies, is intimate. It is not something to which you are a stranger, but it is that with which you, whatever it is, are intimately bound up. That in your seeing, your hearing, your talking, your thinking, your moving, you express that which it is that moves the sun and other stars."
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"In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean."
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"In life as well as in art Zen never wastes energy in stopping to explain; it only indicates."
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