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"Here's an example: someone says, "Master, please hand me the knife," and he hands them the knife, blade first. "Please give me the other end," he says. And the master replies, "What would you do with the other end?" This is answering an everyday matter in terms of the metaphysical.When the question is, "Master, what is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?" Then he replies, "There is enough breeze in this fan to keep me cool." That is answering the metaphysical in terms of the everyday, and that is, more or less, the principle zen works on. The mundane and the sacred are one and the same."
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"God takes the weak and makes them strong. He takes the vile and makes them clean. He takes the worthless and makes them worthwhile. He takes the sinful and makes them sinless."
"How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!"
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"Well, a man's mind can't stay in time the way his body does."
"Life is an intricate play with actors waiting for an explanation. Each added act confers a new interpretation of the story. ['Waiting for the pieces to fall into place']"
"Reality is a background so painted over by our own perceptions that every eye sees the world differently."
"Sometimes you wake up from a dream. Sometimes you wake up in a dream. And sometimes, every once in a while, you wake up in someone else's dream."
"I am counting totally and completely on the Lord Jesus Christ, and not on Billy Graham. I am not going to heaven because I've read the Bible, nor because I've preached to a lot of people. I'm going to heaven because of what Christ did."
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Explore more quotes by Alan Watts
"If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly."
"But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be."
"So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing."
"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance."
"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."
"Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed will be far less destructive, because the aggressor will be careful not to destroy what he is fighting to capture. Reasonable - that is, human - men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life."
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