Favorite Quotes

Times are urgent, so let us slow down.

To-day, then, since I have opportunely freed my mind from all cares [and am happily disturbed by no passions], I will at length apply myself earnestly and freely to the general overthrow of all my former opinions. - Descartes

Never grow a wishbone where your backbone ought to be - Clementine Paddleford

A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ
— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

Wisdom is the ability to choose your actions based on your goals.
— me

To many people…nothing is more uncomfortable than a social hiatus, a period of silent, unstructured time when no one present can think of anything more interesting to say than, “don’t you think the walls are perpendicular tonight?”
— Games People Play, Eric Berne

The challenges are to know what you did, not only only ruminate and self-flagellate about it; to allow yourself to know that you were a different person then, though you can’t erase the bad things you did; and to live the best and most rewarding life now.
— David E Ness

Collapse preserves our humanity by enabling us to go back and create a society that is worth living in, rather than one that is merely complex.

For every complex problem there is a simple solution. And it’s wrong.
— anonymous

Times are urgent, so let us slow down.
— Bayo Akomolafe

You have first to experience what you want to express - Vincent Van Gogh

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.
— Oscar Wilde

It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one’s own faults. One shows the faults of others like chaff winnowed in the wind, but one conceals one’s own faults as a cunning gambler conceals his dice. - The Buddha

No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.
— Theodore Roosevelt

Everyone is using creative energy. But we pray to different gods. When transmission and ritual have intersected to make us conscious, even for a moment, Consciousness itself becomes our God. Only trouble is, Truth is hard on the animal mind. We become prideful, suffer, then remember who to pray to, then become conscious again. When we are out of consciousness in that culture, we believe we should be walking in the power of God. We feel chosen and a failure. So we are ashamed of unconsciousness at a deep level. We feel responsible to share and spread Consciousness. We have seen heaven. To fall from there is hell.
— Joseph Day

We're always distrustful of anybody who says to you, "I have found the answer." Those people should immediately be cast aside, because they have lost their curiosity.
— Bessel van der Kolk

Disaster knocks us out of slumber, but only skillful effort keeps us awake.
— Rebecca Solnit

I hope to arrive to my death late,
in love,
and a little drunk.
— Atticus

Now I am revealing new things to you Things hidden and unknown to you Created just now, this very moment. Of these things you have heard nothing until now. So that you cannot say, Oh yes, I knew this.
— Isaiah 48:6-7 (Jerusalem Bible translation)

the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral
— Kahlil Gibran

Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense
— W.H. Auden

Intellectualization creates a gap or lack of rapport between you and your life. You may think about things so much that you get into the state where you are eating the menu instead of the dinner.
— Alan Watts

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered 'Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.’

Is it a fact - or have i dreamt it - that by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

We cannot live for ourselves alone
Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads
And along these sympathetic fibers
Our actions run as causes and return to us as results.
- Hermann Melville

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o’er wrought heart and bids it break.
— Shakespeare, Macbeth

The ultimate goal of yoga is to always observe things accurately, and therefore never act in a way that will make us regret our actions later.
— TKV Desikachar

The purpose of life, as far as I can tell, is to find a mode of being that’s so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant.
— Jordan Peterson

If you’re depressed or anxious, you’re not weak and you’re not crazy—you’re a human being with unmet needs.
— Johann Hari

It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.
— Abraham Harold Maslow

Authenticity” of self, like authenticity of culture, becomes meaningless when there is no “thine own” to be true to. When it’s obviously impossible to form a systematic self, the task is to surf your own incoherence
— Meaningness, "Atomized Mode"

This entire thing we're involved with, called the world, is an opportunity to exhibit how exciting alienation can be. Life is a matter of a miracle that is collected over time by moments flabbergasted to be in each others' presence...An assumption developed that you cannot understand life and live life simultaneously. I do not agree entirely, which is to say, I do not exactly disagree. I would say that life understood is life lived. But, the paradoxes bug me, and I can learn to love and make love to the paradoxes that bug me, and on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion.
— Speed Levitch

Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter’s tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.
—  Salman Rushdie

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
— Albert Einstein

If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it is lethal.
― Paulo Coelho

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
— Rainer Maria Rilke

Never delay kissing a pretty woman, or opening a bottle of whiskey.
— Ernest Hemingway

There is no light at the end of this tunnel, so it's a good thing we brought matches.
― Sifu Hotman

You can't believe everything you read on the internet.
— Abe Lincoln

It doesn't get any easier, you just go faster.
— Greg Lemond (Tour de France cycling champion)

Let your reach exceed your grasp always. And make your little plot in this world greener because you walked there.
— Lady Bird Johnson

Poetry

How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin's bow,
which draws *one* voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.
— Rainer Maria Rilke

Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact human measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
— Gustave Flaubert

Art

Whenever I am infuriated, I revenge myself with a new diagram
— Florence Nightingale

Having a good presentation is the equivalent of having a British accent
— Jessica Sager

There are moments in facilitation when you can feel the way to the future unblock, when you can feel the room burst forward on behalf of the species. In those moments, I can feel the tingling prickling aliveness of interconnection, of history, of futures becoming possible. Even in those moments, looking around at each other all brightly shining with the present moment, there are no words vast and timeless enough for the spirit amongst us.
— Adrienne Marie Brown

Self-actualization is only possible as a side effect of self-transcendence
— Victor Frankl

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
― Cyril Connolly

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
― Pablo Picasso

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterwards you can remove all traces of reality.
— Pablo Picasso

Community

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti

One hand cannot clap
— Senegalese poet

You think you are thinking your thoughts. You are not. You are thinking the culture's thoughts.
— Krishnamurti

I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.
— Malcolm X

Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.
— MLK

A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob.
— Stilgar, Dune

I went to a village [in Alaska] one time, when the whole village was called together because of a suicide attempt of one of the members, and so they called the whole village together. They were in a gigantic circle. They put the individual in the middle of the circle. Then each person told why they thought that person is important and what that means to them. By the time that that was through, the person knew, realized. Because when you're suicidal, you feel very much alone. When a society gets together and holds that person, that person has meaning to his or her life. It continues on.
— Ilarion "Kuuyux" Merculieff

Management’s job is not to prevent risk (failure) but to build the ability to recover
— Ed Catmull

Conflict

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
— Jonathan Swift

There is no learning without debate. It is by truly embracing disagreement and differences in perspective that we make better decisions, because ideas get pressure-tested and challenged. But to be effective, conflict needs to be about the work, not the people.
— Ed Catmull

Peace within, peace between, peace among.
— Virginia Satir

To a disciple who was forever complaining about others, the Master said, ‘If it is peace you want, seek to change yourself, not other people. It is easier to protect your feet with slippers than to carpet the whole of the earth.
— Anthony de Mello

The obstacle is the path
— Stoic philosophy

Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.
— Winston Churchill

Winning does not tempt that man
For this is how he grows:
By being defeated, decisively,
By constantly greater beings.
— Rilke

Therapy

We psychotherapists simply cannot cluck with sympathy and exhort patients to struggle resolutely with their problems. We cannot say to them YOU and YOUR problems. Instead, we must speak of US and OUR problems, because our life, our existence, will always be riveted to death, love to loss, freedom to fear, and growth to separation. We are, all of us, in this together.
— Irvin D. Yalom

Even the most liberal system of psychiatric nomenclature does violence to the being of another. If we relate to people believing we can categorize them, we will neither identify nor nurture the parts, the vital parts, of the other that transcend category. The enabling relationship always assumes that the other is never fully knowable.
― Irvin D. Yalom

If we were less arrogant, we might also learn much from the “uncertified” individual, who is sometimes unusually adept in the area of human relationships…. And I have slowly come to the conclusion that if we did away with “the expert”, “the certified professional”, “the licensed psychologist”, we might open our profession to a breath of fresh air, a surge of creativity, such as it has not known for years. In every area -medicine, nursing, teaching, bricklaying or carpentry -certification has tied it to the past, has discouraged innovation.
— Carl Rogers