"You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself."
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Alan Watts quotes (page 3 of 25)
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"Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present."
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"The 'you' who you think you are does not exist."
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"The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple."
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"When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique. He is universal by virtue of the inseparability of his organism from the cosmos. He is unique in that he is just this organism and not any stereotype of role, class, or identity assumed for the convenience of social communication."
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"We have a strange anxiety in us; that if we don't interfere then it won't happen. Now that's the root of an enormous amount of trouble."
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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."
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"I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution , where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment... only to vanish forever."
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"If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise; you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are."
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"There is only this now. It does not come from anywhere; it is not going anywhere. It is not permanent, but it is not impermanent. Though moving, it is always still. When we try to catch it, it seems to run away, and yet it is always here and there is no escape from it. And when we turn around to find the self which knows this moment, we find that it has vanished like the past."
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"People sometimes fail to live because they are always preparing to live."
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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."
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"I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is."
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"Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together."
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"Faith is, above all, openness; an act of trust in the unknown."
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"You must not be afraid of playing wrong notes. Just forget it, play it wrong! But play!"
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"To go out of your mind once a day is tremendously important, because by going out of your mind you come to your senses. And if you stay in your mind all of the time, you are over rational, in other words you are like a very rigid bridge which because it has no give; no craziness in it, is going to be blown down by the first hurricane."
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"The mind's the standard of the man."
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"The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego."
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"The destination of life is this eternal moment."
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