quote
The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision.
— Helen Keller
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“The true purpose [of Zen] is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes.”
— Shunryu Suzuki
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“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
— Alan Watts
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“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between a causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality.”
— Alan Watts
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“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
— Alan Watts
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Texts and Pretexts (1932), p. 270.
“It is man’s intelligence that makes him so often behave more stupidly
than the beasts. … Man is impelled to invent theories to account for
what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent
enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he
acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no
animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the
rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as punishment for its
transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd
and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for
example would kill one of its foals to make the wind change direction.
Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the
same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies.
Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the
feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous
folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as
yet, intelligent enough.”—Aldous Huxley