Life Quote by Alan Wilson Watts

““But you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run.””

Alan Wilson Watts

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Life Running water

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“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one…

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“The common mistake of the religious celibate has been to suppose that the highest spiritual life absolutely demands the renunciation of sexuality, as if…

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“Real freedom cannot exist alongside false freedom, but the abandonment of false freedom looks as if it would leave you as good as dead.…

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“But it is not that you are something which is just watching what happens. “What happens” is just using your organism to watch itself. It is the universe centering as a particular being, though it is not necessary to use or insist on this concept, for what is important here is not the idea but the feeling of it. The…

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“Read Theodore Schwenk’s marvelous book Sensitive Chaos (London, Rudolph Steiner Press, 1965),”

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“Idolatry is not the use of images, but confusing them with what they represent, and in this respect mental images and lofty abstractions can…

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“The more we accustom ourselves to understanding the present in terms of memory, the unknown by the known, the living by the dead, the more desiccated and embalmed, the more joyless and frustrated life becomes. So protected from life, man becomes a sort of mollusc encrusted in a hard shell of “tradition,” so that when at last reality breaks through,…

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“We do not dance to reach a certain point on the floor, but simply to dance. Energy itself, as William Blake said, is eternal…

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“Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge construction, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise so long as their progress is considered piecemeal, endlessly having the distance between them.…

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“But this is at the same time a vivid way of saying that your soul, or rather your essential Self, is the whole cosmos as it is centered around the particular time, place, and activity called John Doe. Thus the soul is not in the body, but the body in the soul, and the soul is the entire network of…

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“When you no longer make the distinction between the universe and how you are acting upon it, you are really on your own and…

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“My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern in the water.”

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