"If you insist on being determined by the past that's your game, but the fact of the matter is it all starts right now."
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Quote collection
Alan Watts quotes (page 8 of 25)
499 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith-in life, in other people, and in oneself-is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time."
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"The real Zen of the old Chinese masters was wu-shih, or "no fuss.""
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"Faith is a state of openness or trust."
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"If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead, making it difficult for me to attend to the here and now. If, then , my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world."
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"The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile."
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"What are plants doing? What are plants all about? They serve human beings by being decorative, but what is it from its own point of view? It's using up air; it's using up energy. It's really not doing anything except being ornamental. And yet here's this whole vegetable world, cactus plants, trees, roses, tulips, and edible vegetables, like cabbages, celery, lettuce - they're all doing this dance."
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"The style of God venerated in church, mosque, and synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe."
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"Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way."
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"The Art of Being: A state of wholeness in which the mind functions freely and easily, without the sensation of a second mind or ego standing over it with a club."
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"Our view of reality is like a chart of the sea - the truer it is, the less likely we will become lost."
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"Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart."
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"Western religions are more concerned with behavior, doctrine, and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and our world."
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"To define is to limit, to set boundaries, to compare and to contrast, and for this reason, the universe, the all, seems to defy definition....Just as no one in his senses would look for the morning news in a dictionary, no one should use speaking and thinking to find out what cannot be spoken or thought."
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"The harder we try to catch hold of the moment, to seize a pleasant sensation..., the more elusive it becomes... It is like trying to clutch water in one's hands - the harder one grips, the faster it slips through one's fingers."
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"What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is an urgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained - though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is."
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"I can only think seriously of trying to live up to an ideal, to improve myself, if I am split in two pieces. There must be a good “I” who is going to improve the bad “me.” “I,” who has the best intentions, will go to work on wayward “me,” and the tussle between the two will very much stress the difference between them. Consequently “I” will feel more separate than ever, and so merely increase the lonely and cut-off feelings which make “me” behave so badly."
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"To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it."
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"The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity."
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"They are enlightened who join in this play knowing it as play, for people suffer only because they take as serious what the gods made for fun."
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