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  • Alan Watts Quotes   1248
  • If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are “crying for the moon.” We have no such assurance. The best predictions are still matters of probability rather than certainty, and to the best of our knowledge every one of us is going to suffer and die. If, then, we cannot live happily without an assured future, we are certainly not adapted to living in a finite world where, despite the best plans, accidents will happen, and where death comes at the end.
  • 4 years ago



    Tags : Alan Watts Quotes , Moon Quotes , Suffering Quotes
  • Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.
  • 4 years ago



    Tags : Alan Watts Quotes , Reality Quotes , Play Quotes
  • Enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy... your entire education has has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Watts Quotes , Art Quotes , Skills Quotes
  • Essentially Satori is a sudden experience, and it is often described as a "turning over" of the mind, just as a pair of scales will suddenly turn over when a sufficient amount of material has been poured into one pan to overbalance the weight in the other. Hence it is an experience which generally occurs after a long and concentrated effort to discover the meaning of Zen.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Watts Quotes , Long Quotes , Effort Quotes
  • We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Watts Quotes , Journey Quotes , Heaven Quotes
  • 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.
  • 4 years ago



    Tags : Alan Watts Quotes , Secret Quotes , Together Quotes
  • 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.
  • 4 years ago



    Tags : Alan Watts Quotes , Pain Quotes , Ghost Quotes
  • Our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don't learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Watts Quotes , Educational Quotes , Clothes Quotes
  • Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
  • 4 years ago



    Tags : Alan Watts Quotes , Eye Quotes , Past Quotes
  • There is an ineffable mystery that underlies ourselves and the world. It is the darkness from which the light shines. When you recognize the integrity of the universe and that death is as certain as birth, then you can relax and accept that this is the way it is. There is nothing else to do.
  • 4 years ago



    Tags : Alan Watts Quotes , Integrity Quotes , Light Quotes