"Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible."
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Quote collection
Alan Watts quotes (page 23 of 25)
499 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It seems to be the special peculiarity of human beings that they reflect: they think about thinking and know that they know. This, like other feedback systems, may lead to vicious circles and confusions if improperly managed, but self-awareness makes human experience resonant. It imparts that simultaneous "echo" to all that we think and feel as the box of a violin reverberates with the sound of the strings. It gives depth and volume to what would otherwise be shallow and flat."
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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."
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"The hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests."
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"Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery."
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"A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily."
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"Enlightenment remains unrealized so long as it is considered as a specific state to be attained, and for which there are standards of success."
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"It is also in despair of being able to understand or make any productive contribution to the highly organised chaos of our politico-economic system that large numbers of people simply abandon political and social committments. They just let society be taken over by a pattern of organisation which is as self-proliferative as a weed, and whose ends and values are neither human nor instinctive but mechanical."
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"You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up."
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"A less 'brainy-culture' would learn to synchronise its body rhythms rather than its clocks."
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"If you belong to an in-group of good, or saved, or elite people, you can only know that you’re in because someone else is out. You cannot live on the right side of the tracks without there being a wrong side of the tracks, so you ought to be grateful to the outside for having the privilege of being on the inside."
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"Life and love generate effort but effort will not generate them."
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"For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase—oddly enough—to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization."
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"so, the whole idea, you see, is that everything's falling apart, so don't try and stop it. when you're falling off a precipice, it doesn't do you any good to hang onto a rock that's falling with you. see? but everything is doing that. and so, again, this is another case of our completely wasting our energy in trying to prevent the world from falling apart. don't do it. and then you'll be able to do something interesting with the free energy."
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"But the disappearance of the effort to let go is precisely the disappearance of the separate thinker, of the ego trying to watch the mind without interfering."
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"Where does my fist go when I open up my hand? Where does my lap go when I stand up?"
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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."
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"There is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to "get culture" or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost."
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"I would suggest that today, we know about as much concerning the human mind as we knew about the galaxy in 1300."
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"You are something that the whole world is doing just as when the sea has waves on it."
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