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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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"We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started."
"I believe that in every country the people themselves are more peaceably and liberally inclined than their governments."
"A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me, I'm afraid of widths."
"People generally quarrel because they cannot argue."
"People's personalities, like buildings, have various facades, some pleasant to view, some not."
"How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?"
Explore more quotes by Alan Watts
"Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes."
"The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination."
"What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins" for real things."
"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."
"When somebody plays music, you listen. you just follow those sounds, and eventually you understand the music. the point can't be explained in words because music is not words, but after listening for a while, you understand the point of it, and that point is the music itself. in exactly the same way, you can listen to all experiences."
"But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence which does not work according to plan, according to a one-at-a-time order of thought. Yet the concrete evidence of such an intelligence is right to hand in our own thoughtlessly ordered bodies. For the Tao does not 'know' how it produces the universe just as we do not 'know' how we construct our brains."
"Money alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy."
"No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now."
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