"He [God] had even allowed me a glimpse into His own being. This was a great secret which I dared not and could not reveal to my father. I might have been able to reveal it had he been capable of understanding the direct experience of God. But in my talks with him I never got that far, never even came within sight of the problem, because I always set about it in a very unpsychological and intellectual way, and did everything possible to avoid the emotional aspects. Each time this approach was like a red rag to a bull and led to irritable reactions which were incomprehensible to me. I was unable to understand how a perfectly rational argument could meet with such emotional resistance." - Carl Jung on page 92 of Memories, Dreams, Reflections
"When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn't change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn't change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family. Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world." - Author Unknown
"The New Age stereotype is that it is all about changing ourselves internally and the world will take care of itself. The political activists’ stereotype is that we ignore our inner selves to save the world. Neither works! The cultural creatives are about leaving that dichotomy behind and integrating the evolution of the self and the work on the whole." - Sarah van Gelder, editor of Yes! A Journal of Positive Future
"A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. They then dwell in the house next door, and at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house. Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force." - Carl Jung in Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.” - Charles Bukowski
“Psychological change requires resisting unproductive automatic reflexes and consciously and willfully choosing other alternatives - choices that are different, even opposite, from the automatic reflex - sometimes these new ways of behaving are frightening, but they hopefully are more efficient ways of coping."- Page 90 of I Hate You, Don't Leave Me
"You never know till you try to reach them how accessible men are; but you must approach each man by the right door."- Henry Ward Beecher
"Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within." - James Baldwin
"The explorations and inventions of childhood are usually trivial and ephemeral. In themselves they mean little. But if the processes they involve, the sense of wonder and curiosity, the urge to seek and find and test, can be prevented from fading with age, so that they remain to dominate the mature Stimulus Struggle, over-shadowing the less rewarding alternatives, then an important battle has been won: the battle for creativity.
Many people have puzzled over the secret of creativity. I contend that it is basically no more than the extension into adult life of these vital childlike qualities. The child asks new questions; the adult answers old ones; the childlike adult finds answers to new questions. The child is inventive; the adult is productive; the childlike adult is inventively productive. The child explores his environment; the adult organizes it; the childlike adult organizes his explorations and, by bringing order to them, strengthens them. He creates." - page 227, The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Classic Study of the Urban Animal by Desmond Morris
"...so why is it that they do not all develop bigger and better childlike curiosity? Part of the answer is that children are subordinate to adults...much as adults may love their children, they cannot help seeing them as a growing threat to their dominance...There is therefore a strong tendency to suppress inventiveness in members of the community younger than oneself...By the time the new generation has matured to the point where its members could be wildly inventive, childlike adults, they are already burdened with a heavy sense of conformity.
Only those rare individuals who experience an unusual childhood...will be able to achieve a level of great creativity in adult life...It either has to be so suppressive that the growing child revolts against the traditions of its elders in a big way...or it has to be so un-suppressive that the heavy hand of conformity rests only lightly on its shoulder...Both types can make a great impact in adult society, but the second will probably suffer less from obsessive limitations in his creative acts...The vast majority of children will, of course, receive a more balanced mixture of punishment and reward for their inventiveness...Their attitude to the childlike adults will be ambivalent; on the one hand they will applaud them for providing the much-needed sources of novelty, but on the other they will envy them. The creative talent will therefore find himself alternately praised and damned by society in a bewildering way, and he will be constantly in doubt about his acceptance by the rest of the community." - page 233-5, The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Classic Study of the Urban Animal by Desmond Morris
"The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this:
A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.
To him...
a touch is a blow,
a sound is a noise,
a misfortune is a tragedy,
a joy is an ecstasy,
a friend is a lover,
a lover is a god,
and failure is death.
Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - - - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating." - Pearl Buck
"The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." - Marcel Proust
"What's your criteria of a good school?" Will asked
"Success."
"In what? Winning scholarships? Getting ready for jobs? Obeying the local categorical imperatives?"
"All that, of course," said Mr. Menon. "But the fundamental question remains. What are boys and girls for?"
Will shrugged his shoulders. "The answer depends on where you happen to be domiciled. For example, what are boys and girls for in America? Answer: for mass consumption. And the corollaries of mass consumption are mass communications, mass advertising, mass opiates in the form of television, meprobamate, positive thinking and cigarettes. And now that Europe has made the breakthrough into mass production, what will its boys and girls be for? For mass consumption and all the rest - just like the boys and girls in America. Whereas in Russia there's a different answer. Boys and girls are for strengthening the national state. Hence all those engineers and science teachers, not to mention fifty divisions ready for instant combat and equipped with everything from tanks to H-bombs and long range rockets. And in China it's the same, but a good deal more so. What are boys and girls for there? For cannon fodder, industry fodder, agriculture fodder, road-building fodder. So East is East and West is West-for the moment. But the twain may meet in one or other of two ways. West may get so frightened of East that it will give up thinking that boys and girls are for mass consumption and decide instead that they're for cannon fodder and strengthening the state. Alternatively East may find itself under such pressure from the appliance-hungry masses who long to go Western, that it will have to change its mind and say that boys and girls are really for mass consumption. But that's for the future. As of now, the current answers to your question are mutually exclusive."
"And both of the answers," said Mr. Menon, "are different from ours. What are Palanese boys and girls for? Neither for mass consumption, nor for strengthening the state. The state has to exist, of course. And there has to be enough for everybody. That goes without saying. It's only on those conditions that boys and girls can discover what in fact they are for-only on those conditions that we can do anything about it."
"And what in fact are they for?"
"For actualization, for being turned into full-blown human beings." - page 236, Island by Aldous Huxley
"The educational authorities are horrified. The ingratitude of it all! What has gone wrong? If we are ruthlessly honest with ourselves, the answer is not hard to find. It is contained in the official doctrines of these same educational authorities. As they face the upheaval, they must contemplate the uncomfortable fact that they have brought it on themselves. They literally asked for it. 'Think for yourselves,' they said, 'be resourceful, be active, be inventive.' Contradicting themselves in the same breath, they added: 'But do it on our terms, in our way, and above all abide by our rituals.'" - page 241, The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Classic Study of the Urban Animal by Desmond Morris
"There's nothing more personal, I think, than the shape that emptiness takes inside you; nor more particular than the means by which you fill it." - Clive Barker
"One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again." - Abraham Maslow
"A discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human liberty." - Mark Twain in The American Claimant.
"Reverence and awe aren't democratic virtues. The last thing you need in a free society is people who know their place." - Richard Lacayo in "The Seriously Funny Man" about Mark Twain in Time Magazine, July 14, 2008.
"It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both are border-line concepts for transcendental contents. But empirically it can be established, with a sufficient degree of probability, that there is in the unconscious an archetype of wholeness which manifests itself spontaneously in dreams, etc., and a tendency, independent of the conscious will, to relate other archetypes to this centre. Consequently, it does not seem improbable that the archetype produces a symbolism which has always characterized and expressed the Deity...the God-image does not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with a special content of it, namely the archetype of the self. It is this archetype from which we can no longer distinguish the God-image empirically." - Carl Jung on page 468 of Psychology and Religion: West and East
"...if we're ever going to be truly happy...we need to be willing to charge headlong into the inferno of our most horrific fears - eyes open, intellect and spirit at the ready - even as our survival instincts are screaming, 'Run! Run! Get out!' That takes courage, and that's why courage is one of the prerequisites for happiness. Courage, they say, is not the lack of fear, but the ability to take action in spite of it. But where does that ability come from? What power grants the strength to overcome the sick, shaky feeling of fear? Only one power is that strong: love. In the ultimate analysis, human beings have only two essential primal feelings: fear and love. Fear impels us to survive, and love enables us to thrive. This complementary pair of feelings has been the driving force of human history. Fear is the product of the reptilian brain, hardwired into every fiber of our being, and love is the product of the neocortical higher brain, where spirit and intellect reside. Thus, the dance of the spirit and reptile - the shifting balance between the neocortex and the reptilian brain - is the dance of love and fear. For you to be happy, love must lead this dance." - Page 80 of What Happy People Know: How the New Science of Happiness Can Change Your Life for the Better by Dan Baker, Ph.D..
"When I was young, I believed the same nonsense that a lot of people believe about happiness - that it comes from the flashy veneer of the American dream: money, status, and power. But then I grew up (unlike too many other people, who only grow older) and I began to see that these things often destroyed happiness. I learned that happiness only comes from inner qualities, such as courage, altruism, and optimism. Happiness comes from the self. But where is the self? Who is the self? Who are you? If you don't know, you'll never be happy, because you'll never be able to connect with the inner core qualities that make happiness possible. You'll just travel through life in circles, always going, always intent - never arriving, never content. You should, in fact, be able to describe exactly who you are, right now, in the proverbial 25 words or less." - Page 128 of What Happy People Know: How the New Science of Happiness Can Change Your Life for the Better by Dan Baker, Ph.D.
"People hate a know-it-all, even if they really do." - Me
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
"I'm a PBS mind in an MTV World!" - Unsure who said this initially, but heard it from several people.
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre
minds." - A. Einstein
"To know how little one knows is to have genuine knowledge.
Not to know how little one knows is to be deluded.
Only he who knows when he is deluded can free himself from such delusion.
The intelligent man is not deluded, because he knows and accepts his ignorance as ignorance, and thereby has genuine knowledge." - Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
"A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always appears as a personal problem...The cause of disturbance is...not to be sought in the personal surroundings, but rather in the collective situation." - Carl Jung
"It is hard to imagine what some jealous men can make up their mind to and overlook, and what they can forgive! The jealous are the readiest of all to forgive, and all women know it. The jealous man can forgive extraordinarily quickly (though, of course, after a violent scene), and he is able to forgive infidelity almost conclusively proved, the very kisses and embraces he has seen, if only he can somehow be convinced that it has all been "for the last time," and that his rival will vanish from that day forward, will depart to the ends of the earth, or that he himself will carry her away somewhere, where that dreaded rival will not get near her. Of course the reconciliation is only for an hour. For, even if the rival did disappear next day, he would invent another one and would be jealous of him. And one might wonder what there was in a love that had to be so watched over, what a love could be worth that needed such strenuous guarding. But that the jealous will never understand. And yet among them are men of noble hearts. It is remarkable, too, that those very men of noble hearts, standing hidden in some cupboard, listening and spying, never feel the stings of conscience at that moment, anyway, though they understand clearly enough with their "noble hearts" the shameful depths to which they have voluntarily sunk." - The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Chapter 3
"Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true." - Viktor Frankl on page 116 of Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy.
"The contemporary generation are fearful of existence because it is God-forsaken; only in great masses do they dare to live, and they cluster together en masse in order to feel that they amount to something" - Søren Kirkegaard
"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws." - Plato (427-347 B.C.)
"Always do right- this will gratify some and astonish the rest." - Mark Twain (1835-1910)
""Blessed are they that choose the good; they that choose the pleasant miss the goal." - Katha Upanishad
"Values-talk comes naturally to a nonjudgmental age--an age judgmental primarily about the cardinal sin of being judgmental. It is considered broad-minded to say, "One person's values are as good as another's." It is nonsense to say "One person's virtues are as good as another's." Values are an equal-opportunity business: they are mere choices. Virtues are habits, difficult to develop and therefore not equally accessible to all. Speaking of virtues rather then values is elitist, offensive to democracy's egalitarian, leveling ethos.
Which is why talk of virtues should be revived." - George Will
"...the river of public opinion, which today renders moral judgment only against being "judgmental" - George Will
"Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.
Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." - Elie Wiesel
"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in time of great moral crisis." - Dante Alighieri, 13th Century Italian Poet
"One of the largest chasms in the world lies between shouldn't and don't." - Me
"Some time ago I analyzed [psychoanalyzed] a colleague who had developed a particularly strong dislike of the idea of anyone being allowed to engage in a medical activity who was not himself a medical man. I was in a position to say to him: `We have now been working for more than three months. At what point in our analysis have I had occasion to make use of my medical knowledge?' He admitted that I had had no such occasion" - Sigmund Freud on pp. 92-93 of Question of Lay Analysis.
"There is one question which I can hardly ignore ... would not the diagnosis be justified that many systems of civilisation, or epochs of it --possibly even the whole of humanity-- have become neurotic under the pressure of civilising trends? I would not say that such an attempt to apply psychoanalysis to civilised society would be fanciful or doomed to fruitlessness. But it behooves us to be very careful...The diagnosis of collective neurosis, moreover, will be confronted by a special difficulty. In the neurosis of an individual we can use as a starting-point the contrast presented to us between the patient and his environment, which we assume to be "normal". No such background as this would be available for any society similarly affected; it would have to be supplied in some other way... In spite of all these difficulties, we may expect that one day someone will venture upon this research into the pathology of civilised communities." - Sigmund Freud on pages141-2 of Civilisation and its Discontents.
"Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy. In a similar sense suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon; rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of existential frustration. I would strictly deny that one's search for a meaning to his existence, or even his doubt of it, in every case is derived from, or results in, any disease. Existential frustration is in itself neither pathological nor pathogenic. A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patient's existential despair under a heap of tranquilizing drugs. It is his task, rather, to pilot the patient through his existential crisis of growth and development." - Viktor Frankl on page 108 of Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy.
"He [my father] could not even defend himself against the ridiculous materialism of the psychiatrists. This, too, was something that one had to believe, just like theology, only in the opposite sense. I felt more certain than ever that both of them lacked epistemological criticism as well as experience. My father was obviously under the impression that psychiatrists had discovered something in the brain which proved that in the place where mind should have been there was only matter, and nothing "spiritual". This was borne out by his admonitions that if I studied medicine I should in Heaven's name not become a materialist. To me this warning meant that I ought to believe nothing at all, for I knew that materialists believed in their definitions just as the theologians did in theirs and that my poor father had simply jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. I recognized that this celebrated faith of his had played this deadly trick on him, and not only on him but on most of the cultivated and serious people I knew. The arch sin of faith, it seemed to me, was that it forestalled experience. How did the theologians know that God had deliberately arranged certain things and "permitted" certain others, and how did the psychiatrists know that matter was endowed with the qualities of the human mind?" - Carl Jung on page 94 of Memories, Dreams, Reflections
"In many cases in psychiatry, the patient who comes to us has a story that is not told, and which as a rule no one knows of. To my mind, therapy only really begins after the investigation of that wholly personal story. It is the patient's secret, the rock against which he is shattered. If I know his secret story, I have a key to the treatment. The doctor's task is to find out how to gain that knowledge. In most cases exploration of the conscious material is insufficient. Sometimes an association test can open the way; so can the interpretation of dreams, or long and patient human contact with the individual. In therapy the problem is always the whole person, never the symptom alone. We must ask questions which challenge the whole personality." - Carl Jung on page 117 of Memories, Dreams, Reflections
"Clinical diagnoses are important, since they give the doctor a certain orientation; but they do not help the patient. The crucial thing is the story. For it alone shows the human background and the human suffering, and only at that point can the doctor's therapy begin to operate." - Carl Jung on page 124 of Memories, Dreams, Reflections
"Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche." - Carl Jung on page 335 of Memories, Dreams, Reflections
"Nonviolent passive resistance is effective as long as your opposition adheres to the same rules as you do," he said. "But if peaceful protest is met with violence, its efficacy is at an end. For me, non-violence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon." - Long Walk to Freedom, chapter 17 - Nelson Mandela
"Conformity or rebellion? Neither one. Both ways are
simple-minded - they are only for people who cannot cope
with contradiction and ambiguity."
- Neil Stephenson in The Diamond Age
"One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as
a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating
the very phrases which our founding fathers used in
their struggle for independence." - Charles Austin Beard (American Historian, 1874-1948)
"As reformers, we seldom win by making a frontal attack. No, we work
and we work at a reform and never get too far with it. And while we are
hitting our heads against the wall, we tinker with the idea and it gets
better and better and more and more people understand what we are
getting at. But we never win. The other side loses. Just when we are
about to pack up our banners, along comes an Enron or a Watergate.
In the states and in the nation, we only win by being ready, by being
on the spot with a good, workable alternative, when the unsustainable
systems fail, as they always do." - Granny D
"Full public financing of elections is a structural adjustment, not a band-aid. It's a change that makes other changes possible." - Jim Ace, Ruckus Society
"Sweeping campaign finance reform is the one reform that can prevent the pollution and degradation of both our civic and natural environments." - Granny D
"It's dangerous to be right when those in power are wrong." - Voltaire
"When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure." - Rudolf Bahro
"The job in getting people to fight and have faith is in making them believe in what life has made them feel. Making them feel that their feelings are as good as those of others." - Native Son by Richard Wright
"All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field." - Albert Einstein
"The purpose of relationships is not happiness, but transformation." - Andrew Schneider
"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed." - Carl Jung
"No person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right
to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended." - Alice Walker
"The only reason we don't open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don't feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else's eyes." - Pema Chodron
"Another danger is that, if you listen long enough you may start attending to what's being said. You may start thinking about other people, even sympathizing with them. You may develop a true empathy for others, and this will turn you into such a human oddity that you will become a social outcast." - P.J. O'Rourke in Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People
"I've heard it said that people come into our lives for a reason, bringing something that we must learn. And we are led to those who help us most to grow... If we let them, and we help them in return.- Glinda in the song For Good from the musical Wicked
"The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life" - Sigmund Freud on religion in Civilization and Its Discontents
"The pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive." - Einstein on Prayer, Purpose in Nature, and the Soul
"Every pulpit is a pillory, in which stands a hired culprit, defending the justice of his own imprisonment. " - Robert Ingersoll
"Professional scientists, given brief, uncertain glimpses of nature's workings, are no less vulnerable to anguish and confusion when they come face to face with incongruity. And incongruity, when it changes the way a scientist sees, makes possible the most important advances." - James Gleick on page 35 of Chaos
"Then there are revolutions. A new science arises out of one that has reached a dead end. Often a revolution has an interdisciplinary character - its central discoveries often come from people straying outside the normal bounds of their specialties. The problems that obsess these theorists are not recognized as legitimate lines of inquiry. Thesis proposals are turned down or articles are refused publication. The theorists themselves are not sure whether they would recognize an answer if they saw one. They accept risk to their careers. A few freethinkers working alone, unable to explain where they are heading, afraid even to tell their colleagues what they are doing - that romantic image lies at the heart of Kuhn's scheme, and it has occurred in real life, time and time again, in the exploration of chaos." - James Gleick on page 37 of Chaos
"Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on Earth." - Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.
"We are healed of a suffering only by expressing it to the full." - Marcel Proust
"There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain." - R.D. Laing
"The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering." - Carl Jung
"I've wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We saw it and yet we didn't see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. Conned, perhaps, into thinking that the real action was metropolitan and all this was just boring hinterland. It was a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling. We were both looking at the same thing, seeing, the same thing, talking about the same thing, except he was looking, seeing, talking and thinking from a completely different dimension." - Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.
"All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Gandhi
"Let me give you a quote, the best thing ever written for writers, or for artists of any kind. It comes from André Gide, and I give it to all my writing students: 'What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it, written as well as you, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself -- and thus make yourself indispensable." - Daniel Quinn in Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest.
"You have known for a long time what you must do. You have sense enough. Don't give way to drunkenness and incontinence of speech. Don't give way to sensual lust and above all to the love of money. And close your taverns...if you can't close all, at least two or three. And above all...don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect, he ceases to love and, in order to occupy and distract himself without love, he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures and sinks to bestiality in his vices...all from continual lying to other men and to himself.
The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone. You know, it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn't it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself...has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque...has quartered a word and made a mountain out of a molehill. He knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense and he will revel in his resentment until he feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness." - Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov.
"Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps, then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." - Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet
"During those years, between 1918 and 1920, I began to understand that the goal of psychic development is the self. There is no linear evolution; there is only circumambulation of the self. Uniform development exists, at most, only at the beginning; later, everything points toward the center. This insight gave me stability, and gradually my inner peace returned. I knew that in finding the mandala as an expression of the self I had attained what was for me the ultimate. Perhaps someone else knows more, but not I." - Carl Jung on page 196 of Memories, Dreams, Reflections
"Everyone has his own specific vocation in life...Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated...Thus everyone's task is as unique as his specific opportunity to implement it. We detect rather than invent our mission in life." - Viktor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy.
"He who knows not and knows not that he knows not:
He is a fool . . . shun him.
He who knows not and knows that he knows not:
He is simple . . . teach him.
He who knows and knows not that he knows:
He is asleep . . . wake him.
He who knows and knows that he knows:
He is wise . . . follow him." - Unknown Arabian Author
"What you permit, you promote" - unknown therapist
"We teach what we allow." - Unknown
[Although] "...we succeed in enterprises which demand the positive qualities we possess....we excel in those which can also make use of our defects." - Alexis de Tocqueville
