c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I have come to the conclusion that there are three aspects of life that can give our existence the joy, purpose and meaning that we may seek.1) To find a work that gives us such pleasure that it does not feel like work2) To make a significant positive contribution to civilization3) To find true romantic love in ones lifeFinding ones purpose in life, making a contribution to mankind or findingtrue romantic love, would be the epitome of true happinessI. Alan Appt“The Strength in Knowing
— I. Alan Appt, The Strength in Knowing
Many religions start with the notion that the deity is male and that, therefore, males are superior to women. This irrational idea informs boys' sexual map as they grow into men and breeds ideas such as the following: women are subservient to men; men have control over women's bodies; and men are more intelligent and closer to their god.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
The notion that a woman's sexuality belongs only to the husband is a central tenet tied to the idea that a woman is the property of the father first, then the property of the husband.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
All the whackjob psychologists out there will tell you that grief is a process. Some say it has five stages. Others say that grief should only last two years at the lost, otherwise it's "abnormal". Putting an expiration date of grief though is like putting out the flame on a burning candle. It might stop the candle from melting down and falling apart, but in the long run the candle goes solid, freezes in a catatonic state. Take away a person's grief and guaranteed they'll only be a frozen shell of a human being afterwards. Grief is only love, it's nothing to hide or send away with happy pills and mother's little helpers. Grief is a lifeline connecting two people who are in different realms together, and it's a sign of loyalty and hope.
— Rebecca McNutt
The damaging part of learning to live your life in two parts , whether in reality or fantasy, cannot be underestimated. It is an infectious skill that you learned, one that would eventually spread beyond the bedroom of your life. Life wasn't ever what it seemed on the surface. Nothing could be trusted for what it appeared to be. After all, you weren't what you appeared to be. In learning to hide part of yourself, you lost the ability to trust anything or anyone fully. Without knowing it, you traded humane innocence for dry cynicism.
— Alan Downs, The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man's World
There is a dead space between most people and those afflicted with Mental Illness and it's called Understanding
— Stanley Victor Paskavich, Stantasyland: Stantasyland: Quips, Quotes & Quandaries
Rikki looked over at me.“Why now?" she asked, looking back at Arly. “Why is this happening now?""Hard to say." Arly [therapist] replied. "DID usually gets diagnosed in adulthood. Something happens that triggers the alters to come out. When Cam's father died and he came in to help his brother run the family business he was in close contact with his mother again. Maybe it was seeing Kyle around the same age when some of the abuse happened. Cam was sick for a long time and finally got better. Maybe he wasn't strong enough until now to handle this. It's probably a combination of things. But it sure looks like some of the abuse Cam experienced involved his mother. And sexual abuse by the mother is considered to he one of the most traumatic forms of abuse. In some ways it's the ultimate betrayal.
— Cameron West, First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple
Humans love sex. Both men and women are wired to be sexually responsive. Sex is the social glue of the human species. It takes heavy-handed training or trauma to kill a human's sex drive.Religion has that power. Sexual training in guilt, shame, and fear begins virtually at birth by sexualizing nudity. The religious signal is that nudity is always sexual and the body must be covered for modesty. The Adam and Eve story is taught to young children even though they have no way to know what it means.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
Certain levels of human understanding cannot be attained, it is claimed, until the brain can work in more than one way.
— Idries Shah, The World of the Sufi: An Anthology of Writings about Sufis and Their Work
In childhood we inhabit a world of wonderful contrasts that later we often come to see as bizarre and do our best to rearrange, with everything in its 'proper' place. Unusual juxtapositions we label surrealistic. Yet what is surrealism but a second childhood with Freudian overtones which we have to be re-educated to enjoy? -- part of the tragedy of growing up
— Ken Russell
Admitting the need for help may also compound the survivor's sense of defeat. The therapists Inger Agger and Soren Jensen, who work with political refugees, describe the case of K, a torture survivor with severe post-traumatic symptoms who adamantly insisted that he had no psychological problems: "K...did not understand why he was to talk with a therapist. His problems were medical: the reason why he did not sleep at night was due to the pain in his legs and feet. He was asked by the therapist...about his political background, and K told him that he was a Marxist and that he had read about Freud and he did not believe in any of that stuff: how could his pain go away by talking to a therapist?
— Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
While [female genital mutilation] may have not originated with Islam, it has become an integral part of the religious practice in many regions tied to notions of male dominance and control of female sexuality.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
Kraus asks the question of Freudian analysis: What would be enough? At what point would talking about one’s problems for x hours a week, be sufficient to bring one to a state of “normalcy”?The genius of Freudianism, Kraus writes, is not the creation of a cure, but of a disease—the universal, if intermittent, human sentiment that “something is not right,” elaborated into a state whose parameters, definitions, and prescriptions are controlled by a self-selecting group of “experts,” who can never be proved wrong.It was said that the genius of the Listerine campaign was attributable to the creation not of mouthwash, but of halitosis. Kraus indicts Freud for the creation of the nondisease of dissatisfaction. (See also the famous “malaise” of Jimmy Carter, which, like Oscar Wilde’s Pea Soup Fogs, didn’t exist ’til someone began describing it.) To consider a general dissatisfaction with one’s life, or with life in general as a political rather than a personal, moral problem, is to exercise or invite manipulation. The fortune teller, the “life coach,” the Spiritual Advisor, these earn their living from applying nonspecific, nonspecifiable “remedies” to nonspecifiable discomforts.The sufferers of such, in medicine, are called “the worried well,” and provide the bulk of income and consume the bulk of time of most physicians. It was the genius of the Obama campaign to exploit them politically. The antecedent of his campaign has been called Roosevelt’s New Deal, but it could, more accurately, be identified as The Music Man.
— David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture
Religion does not stop adolescents from having sex
—  it only makes them feel bad about about the sex they do have.
Open, fact-based sex education is among the biggest threats to religion. Knowing the facts about sex reveals the myths that religions preach.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
The conflict between church teachings and natural desires results in guilt, shame and anger.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
The ramifications of workplace violence can have a lingering effect on the organization for generations.
— Asa Don Brown, Interpersonal Skills in the Workplace, Finding Solutions that Work
Celibacy is nothing if not abnormal. The human body and brain are not made for such programming. Whatever normal is, it does not include celibacy.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
From fear of death to sexualizing the normal and marking children, religion is hell bent on creating an environment that is sexually negative –an environment that systematically and arbitrarily restricts options for people. Regardless of the biological map of an individual, religion will do its best to impose its map. The map is almost always focused on what not to do. Since humans can rarely, if ever, live up to such a restrictive standard, it gives religion a huge opportunity to develop guilt and shame, leading the person back to the religion for relief. The map bears no resemblance to human sexuality. It is an artificial and arbitrary set of rules imposed by the religion on its adherents. The result is oppression of women, sexual misinformation, fear of death, repression of homosexuals and much more.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
Thought
—  the dwelling home of the invisible thing that commands the visible things
Ambiguity begets participation.
— Daniel J. Levitin
By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.
— Steven Pinker
The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has shown that the same neural mechanisms mediate the fear response in all sorts of animals, from pigeons and rats to cats and humans. The idea that other animals experience similar emotions to us is not anthropomorphism: it is based on sound scientific evidence.
— Dylan Evans, A brief introduction to emotions
When our grandparents failed, they had comfortable spiritual furniture to rest in. They had, for the most part, their relationship to God, their relationship to a nation they loved, their relationship to a community and a large extended family. Faith in God, community, nation, and the large extended family have all eroded in the last forty years, and the spiritual furniture that we used to sit in has become threadbare.
— Martin E.P. Seligman
The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep).Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent?
— Eugene Thacker, Cosmic Pessimism
If you ask an introvert a question, wait until she thinks about it. Introverts think before speaking, not through speaking. If you want to get to the good stuff, you need to slow down.
— Laurie Helgoe
The supremacy of cerebral, manipulative thinking goes together with an atrophy of emotional life.
— Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? The Nature of the Psyche
The three most powerful seasonings are hunger, variety, and gratitude.
— Neel Burton
Having needs is not evidence of weakness – it is human.
— Danielle Bernock, Emerging with Wings: A True Story of Lies, Pain, and the Love That Heals
If the religious system does not correspond to the prevalent social character, if it conflicts with the social practice of life, it is only an ideology.
— Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? The Nature of the Psyche
...it's a mistake to think that happiness is the goal. I'm not sure I understand." "I was referring to the goals which you in your civilization are so good at setting yourselves, and which incidentally allow you to achieve many interesting things. But happiness is a different thing altogether. If you try to achieve it, you have every chance of failing. And besides, how would you ever know that you achieved it? Of course one can't blame people, especially unhappy people, for wanting to be happier and setting themselves goals in order to try to escape from their unhappiness.
— François Lelord, Hector and the Search for Happiness
They have their big, ever-changing egos, but none has a self, a core, a sense of identity.
— Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? The Nature of the Psyche
Those who unconsciously despair yet put on the mask of optimism are not necessarily wise. But those who have not given up hope can succeed only if they are hardheaded realists, shed all illusions, and fully appreciate the difficulties.
— Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? The Nature of the Psyche
The deepest yearning of human beings seems to be a constellation in which the two poles (motherliness and fatherliness, female and male, mercy and justice, feeling and thought, nature and intellect) are united in a synthesis, in which both sides of the polarity lose their antagonism and, instead, color each other.
— Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? The Nature of the Psyche
Wherever sexually restrictive religions invade, they bring the tools of repression with them - fear of punishment, shame if caught, guilt that the deity watches and terror of punishment. Islam, Christianity and Judaism, with their patriarchal, asexual god, have systemically overcome local sexual ideas throughout the world and infected cultures with sex-negative practices.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
There are few things ever dreamed of, smoked or injected that have as addictive an effect on our brains as technology. This is how our devices keep us captive and always coming back for more. The definitive Internet act of our times is a perfect metaphor for the promise of reward: we search. And we search. And we search some more, clicking that mouse like – well, like a rat in a cage seeking another “hit”, looking for the elusive reward that will finally feel like enough.
— Kelly McGonigal, Maximum Willpower
Humility has to precede instruction.
— Idries Shah, Sufi Thought and Action
I stare past her at the inspirational kitten posters. There's one of a soaking-wet kitten climbing out of a toilet with the caption "it could be worse!""Just tell me whatever it is you're thinking," Mrs. Paulsen says. "Whatever is going through your mind right now.""I hope they didn't actually drop a cat in the toilet to get that picture," I choke out. "...Pardon?""Nothing. Sorry.
— Robin Stevenson, The World Without Us
One of the really tough things is figuring out what questions to ask. Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy.
— Ashlee Vance
Obsessions don't subside. They evolve.
— Alex Crimson
When Islam swept out of the Arabian Peninsula, it became an invasive species to both the pagan and Christian areas it conquered. With it came the sexual practices of a very patriarchal, polygamist culture. While the religions it displaced were not particularly sex positive, Islamic sexual practices, on the whole, were uniformly sex negative.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
There are many afterlife ideas and little agreement on what it may be.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
With the concept of an afterlife, religion creates a portal to infect people by means of terror and fear of death. If one has no concept of an afterlife, then fear of eternal punishment becomes an effective way to convince people of the need to perform specific rituals and live a certain way.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
As conscious beings, we are capable of understanding that we will die some day. We also have the ability to imagine a world after we die. Religion hijacks this ability and injects fear of eternal torture and abandonment as well as the promise of eternal bliss. A perfect carrot and stick approach. The ability to imagine what is beyond the horizon of death is what allows religion to take control and make us do unnatural things.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
Once one is convinced of the idea of eternal life or death, the person may do almost anything to achieve the reward or avoid punishment. He may fly an airplane into a building or become a missionary to another county. She may become a celibate nun or vow to raise a quiver full of children and homeschool them according to her religion. At the very least, the person will attend church regularly, give money, pray and do other things to ensure good standing with the deity. The root of this action is the hope for a reward and avoidance of punishment.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
Toxic relationships are like a good pasta that has been overcooked.
— Asa Don Brown, Interpersonal Skills in the Workplace, Finding Solutions that Work
In a relativistic universe you don't cling to anything, you learn to swim. And you know what swimming is - it's kind of a relaxed attitude with the water. In which you don't keep yourself afloat by holding the water, but by a certain giving to it.
— Alan W. Watts, The Essential Alan Watts
Narcissistic fathers leave their daughters with deep doubts about whether a man can love them, since the first important man in their life was so in love with himself that he had no love left for them. If you are a daughter of a narcissistic father you may have withdrawn from men and bound yourself to mother, either overtly or emotionally. Or you may be engaged in a self-destructive attempt to be his kind of girl, whatever that is, as you try desperately to extract his love. Perhaps you have transferred this into a masochistic position with other men, finding a narcissistic man incredibly attractive as you try to master the mystery of winning his love. And narcissistic men appeal to you because you wish you could be that way yourself - assertive, not giving a damn, self-important - but you lack the confidence to do it yourself so you identify with the man who has their quality, even if it's at your expense. (I have often seen this revealed in those instances where a woman has suffered through a degradingly submissive and abusing relationship with a man, or a series of men, and then, gaining the strength to break that kind of bondage, violently overturns the tables and abuses that man, or the next man in her life, as degradingly as she was misused. It's not just revenge, but the release of hidden desire to be powerful and to be able to control father and make him beg for her love.)
— Howard M. Halpern, Cutting Loose: An Adult's Guide to Coming to Terms with Your Parents
Happiness is a choice and a state of mind.
— Asa Don Brown, Waiting to Live
The pain I feel from the razor blade doesn’t even come close to what I’m feeling inside so it’s useless because the equation is messed up: because razor blade pain should be equal to or greater than the heartache, that’s just CUTTING 101. And if it’s not—well you’re fucked, my friend. It was nice knowing you, but you know what time it is?It’s time to let to let the darkness in.Quid pro quo and all that.It’s time to find something more agonizing than the touch of the blade.
— Kady Hunt, Seven Cuts
Abuse may consist of physical maltreatment or language that is belittling, discriminatory...
— Asa Don Brown, The effects of childhood trauma on adult perception and worldview
A secure attachment is the ability to bond
—  to develop a secure and safe base...
But a map is not enough as a guide for action; we also need a goal that tells us where to go. Animals have no such problems. Their instincts provide them with a map as well as with goals. But lacking instinctive determination and having a brain that permits us to think of many directions in which we can go, we need an object of total devotion, a focal point for all our strivings and the basis for all our effective - not only our proclaimed - values. We need such an object of devotion in order to integrate our energies in one direction, to transcend our isolated existence, with all its doubts and insecurities, and to answer our need for a meaning of life.
— Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? The Nature of the Psyche
People develop a conscience with or without religion. Our culture teaches murder and cheating are wrong; we don't need religion to know this.Guilt comes from a different place in our mental experience, a place that is independent of general cultural training and directly related to religious indoctrination. That is why two people may feel guilt about different things while being equally convinced that cheating and murder are wrong.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
What then am I? In the end, all we have is simply what we find, and what we can usefully say to each other about what we find is all that needs to be said. And perhaps, in the end, it's best just to sit quietly and let go of that thought too.
— Murray Shanahan
In the Christian view, sex was an unclean act. Ask Christians, "Did Jesus have sex?" and watch their nonverbal response. Or ask, "Did Peter enjoy sex with his wife?" or "Did Mary and Martha, 'whom Jesus loved,' ever enjoy a good orgasm?" Such questions do not compute in the Christian mind. The Christian founders are seen as asexual.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
Real happiness provides you the confidence that you never thought was obtainable.
— Asa Don Brown, Waiting to Live
Growing up in a religious environment, children learn what not to do sexually. They learn that some practices or ideas, such as homosexuality, lust, masturbation, and pornography are sinful. These ideas are embedded in the minds of children years before they are ready for marriage, so it's no surprise that many religious people have little or no experience with sex and know little about their sexuality.The guilt cycle that results from this training creates a form of self-censorship. Because so many sex acts and ideas are liable to lead to eternal damnation, people have a strong incentive to avoid expressing or discussing secretly held ideas and interests. Fear leads to hidden thoughts and activities and prevents normal, appropriately channeled sexual expression.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
Trauma may be endured through a physiological or psychological threat to life or overall wellbeing.
— Asa Don Brown, The effects of childhood trauma on adult perception and worldview
My traumatic experience was life changing
— Asa Don Brown, The effects of childhood trauma on adult perception and worldview
Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.
— Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Survivors of trauma may have difficulty initiating relationships ...
— Asa Don Brown, The effects of childhood trauma on adult perception and worldview
Saadi: Be a true renouncer, (zahid) and [you can even] ware satin.
— Idries Shah, Sufi Thought and Action
All major religions put most of the responsibility for sexual morality on women. Religions teach that women should remain chaste and should control and hide their sexuality so men will not be tempted.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
Today, Islam effectively resists secularization primarily because of its use of shame. Within the community, each person's sexuality is tied to his or her family and to the community. To violate the sexual rules of Allah violates both the family and the community. This powerful distortion allows Islam to remain isolated from secular sexual influences. The terror of social sanction or violence keeps young people from following their heart. It prevents healthy sexual exploration and development in men and women.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
If you expect the battle to be insurmountable, you've met the enemy.It's you.
— Khang Kijarro Nguyen
Religious training and indoctrination creates internal states that are in conflict with natural urges and drives.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
The idea that you have to be protected from any kind of uncomfortable emotion is what I absolutely do not subscribe to.
— John Cleese
However much you have been wanting and hoping and dreaming of meeting the person of your dreams, it is only when you meet them that you will start missing them. It seems that the presence of an object is required to make its absence felt (or to make the absence of something felt). A kind of longing may have preceded their arrival, but you have to meet in order to feel the full force of your frustration in their absence.
— Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
This is what labels do. They stick. If people think you're MAD, then everything you do, everything you think, will have MAD stamped across it.
— Nathan Filer
And what does helping someone really mean? Helping them to be like everyone else, or helping them to be themselves?
— Nancy Garden, Annie on My Mind
If I look closely I can see we have the same colour eyes, not me and Simon, but me and the boy who is also me, the boy who I can no longer recognise, with whom I no longer share a single thought, worry, or hope.
— Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall
I wasn't convinced I was crazy, though I feared I was. Some people say that having any conscious opinion on the matter is a mark of sanity, but I'm not sure that's true. I still think about it. I'll always have to think about it.
— Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted
Recovered. Had my personality crossed over that border, whatever and wherever it was, to resume life within the confines of normal? Had I stopped arguing with my personality and learned to straddle the line between sane and insane?
— Susanna Kaysen
Humility is a teacher of itself. It is learnt by means of its practise.
— Idries Shah, Wisdom of the Idiots
he who speaks parables knows and understands the real meaning of parables better
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
The most chronic and complex of the dissociative disorders, multiple personality disorder, was renamed multiple personality disorder, was renamed 'dissociative identity disorder' in 1994 in DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association). The rationale for the name change, was among other things, to clarify that there are not literally separate personalities in a person with dissociative identity disorder; 'personalities' was a historical term for the fragmented identity states that characterize the condition.
— Colin A. Ross, Evolving Psychosis: Different Stages, Different Treatments
Living a religious sexual lifestyle is tantamount to living a lie.Religion distorts our sexuality when the majority of religious people live one life for the public and another in private. It can be as simple as living as a "happily married" couple when you are both miserable with your sex life.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
I favour humans over ideology, but right now the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas, where everyone is either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. We can lead good, ethical lives, but some bad phraseology in a Tweet can overwhelm it all - even though we know that's not how we should define our fellow humans. What's true about our fellow humans is that we are clever and stupid. We are grey areas.And so ... when you see an unfair or an ambiguous shaming unfold, speak up on behalf of the shamed person. A babble of opposing voices - that's democracy.The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people. Let's not turn it into a world where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless.
— Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed
You know, it is sometimes an ideal not to have any kind of convictions or feelings that are not based upon reality. One must even educate people...that their emotions ought to have a real basis, that they cannot swear hell and damnation at somebody on a mere assumption, and that there are absolute reasons why they are not justified in doing such a thing. They really have to learn that their feelings should be based on facts.But to [develop further] one should unlearn all that. One should even admit that all one's psychical facts have nothing to do with material facts. For instance, the anger which you feel for somebody or something, no matter how justified it is, is not caused by those external things. It is a phenomenon all by itself. That is what we call taking a thing on its subjective level. ...If you have reached that level...you have succeeded in dissolving the absolute union of material external facts with internal or psychical facts. You begin to consider the game of the world as your game, the people that appear outside as exponents of your psychical condition. Whatever befalls you, whatever experience or adventure you have in the external world, is your own experience.
— C.G. Jung
An integral approach is based on one basic idea: no human mind can be 100% wrong. Or, we might say, nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time. And that means, when it comes to deciding which approaches, methodologies, epistemologies, or ways or knowing are "correct," the answer can only be, "All of them." That is, all of the numerous practices or paradigms of human inquiry — including physics, chemistry, hermeneutics, collaborative inquiry, meditation, neuroscience, vision quest, phenomenology, structuralism, subtle energy research, systems theory, shamanic voyaging, chaos theory, developmental psychology—all of those modes of inquiry have an important piece of the overall puzzle of a total existence that includes, among other many things, health and illness, doctors and patients, sickness and healing.
— Ken Wilber
The wizards were civilized men of considerable education and culture. When faced with being inadvertently marooned on a desert island they understood immediately that the first thing to do was place the blame
— Terry Pratchett
Historically, psychologists have looked at introversion as the absence of extroversion. They measure extroversion, and if you are low in it, then you are considered an introvert. This perpetuates the perception of introversion as negative space, and introverted activities as not really doing anything. We need to train ourselves, and others, out of this idea. We need to start seeing doing nothing (or reading, or working alone on projects, or whatever it is we do to recharge) as activities that are as valid as any social event.
— Sophia Dembling, Introverts in Love: The Quiet Way to Happily Ever After
Unravelling the complexity of human development is a daunting task and it is unlikely that scientists will ever be able to do so for even one individual, because the interactions of biology and environment are likelihoods and not certainties. There are just too many ways that the cards could stack up. More importantly, as the vernacular saying goes, "Shit happens", which is a very succinct and scientifically accurate way of saying that random events during development can change the course of who we become in unpredictable ways.
— Bruce Hood, Kanunların Ruhu Üzerine
Tthe thing is, Dr. Foster…the truth is, I like Marina.” He eyed the doctor. “And I actually don’t like you very much.”Oh, it was worth it. God, it was worth it. To see the perennially calm face turn pale, only slightly, but still pale; to see him blink away the hurt in his watery, pallid blue eyes.
— Amelia Mangan, Release
The reality is that every time we manipulate nature's rhythms, we create unintended consequences that then require us to make still further changes."~ Glenn Aparicio Parry
— Glenn Aparicio Parry, Original Thinking: A Radical Revisioning of Time, Humanity, and Nature
A writer sets up his own amazing experiment: his work of fiction.
— Eric Maisel Ph.D., What Would Your Character Do?: Personality Quizzes for Analyzing Your Characters
When you just have a torch and horror around you... then turn off the torch.
— Mohammad Ali V, The Three Others
In life, the people whom you find the most challenging inevitably are the ones who have the most to teach you.
— Julie Holland, Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs You're Taking, The Sleep You're Missing, The Sex You're Not Having, and What's Really Making You Crazy
The acknowledgement of a single possibility can change everything.
— Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays
Few endeavors, if any at all, I find to be inherently mature or inherently immature. Maturity is neither defined by one's particular preferences nor by one's particular activities; rather, it is defined by the strength of one's character.
— Criss Jami, Healology
Narcissism: It's Primal. No Productive Control of Energy: Seeks constant fresh sources of stimulation and is highly energized running from human-object to human-object, activity to activity, but does not accomplish anything and never evolves or learns from activities and the many people recycled through.
— Lynna Kivela, My Sociopath: From Sociopath Parents to Loving Sociopaths to Waking Up
The best way to reduce stress in your life is to stop screwing up.
— Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
An open mind, is the best weapon, in the fight between light and darkness
— Soke Behzad Ahmadi
. . . what matters in combat is adaptability, boldness and maintaining A cool exterior, whilst penetrating your enemy's soul with An icy cold stare- Diary of A Combat Fiend
— Soke Behzad Ahmadi, Dirty Fighting : Lethal Okinawan Karate
The greatest mistake in the treatment of diseases is that there are physicians for the body and physicians for the soul, although the two cannot be separated.
— Plato
The science of psychology lies within your own head making complex decisions and showing different attitudes
— Mohammad Ali V, The Three Others
By what incomprehensible mechanism are our organs held in subjection to sentiment and thought? How is it that a single melancholy idea shall disturb the whole course of the blood; and that the blood should in turn communicate irregularities to the human understanding? What is that unknown fluid which certainly exists and which, quicker and more active than light, flies in less than the twinkling of an eye into all the channels of life,—produces sensations, memory, joy or grief, reason or frenzy,—recalls with horror what we would choose to forget; and renders a thinking animal, either a subject of admiration, or an object of pity and compassion?
— Voltaire
This may sound like a bunch of psychobabble, but the truth is that we are all filled with contradictions; personality is fluid not black and white. And, well…we are all both strongand weak. That’s what it means to be human. We all have flaws, weaknesses. The real strength is when we can admit these to ourselves and become able to show them to others.
— Jacqueline Simon Gunn
We called one's lifestyle a vital lie, and now we can understand better why we said it was vital: it is a necessary and basic dishonesty about oneself and one's whole situation... We don't want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives.
— Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
The future depends on what choices we make....
— I. Alan Appt, The Strength in Knowing
They had an ugly look to one as prone to disgust and fear as the changes of a few hours had made me.
— Charles Dickens
Awareness is the novelty of our youth
— Brian Triptow, Wild Grapes The Charlie Newsome Story
Jungian psychology built upon a numinous sandcastle-of-gilded- abstractions, reflects modernity’s transcendental reinstatement of Theosophy into an archetypal, pseudo-scientific conflation of mysticism and shamanic-induced revelation.
— Albert Thomas Bifarelli
This may sound like a bunch of psychobabble, but the truth is that we are all filled with contradictions; personality is fluid not black and white. And, well…we are all both strongand weak. That’s what it means to be human. We all have flaws,weaknesses. The real strength is when we can admit these to ourselves and become able to show them to others.
— Jacqueline Simon Gunn, Circle of Betrayal
You know very well what the right choice is, yet you keep making the wrong one.
— Richard O'Connor, Rewire: Change Your Brain to Break Bad Habits, Overcome Addictions, Conquer Self-Destruc tive Behavior
What do you consider the most humane? - To spare someone shame. What is the seal of liberation? - To no longer be ashamed in front of oneself.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Men most often know what they want, yet they are not always sure how they feel. Women most often know how they feel, yet they may not always know what they want.
— Ken Poirot, Mentor Me: GA=T+E—A Formula to Fulfill Your Greatest Achievement
For every Pharoah there is a Moses.
— Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams
One either cares what others think about him, or cares what others think he thinks about them. If you want to find someone who doesn't care in the slightest what anyone thinks, try a lunatic asylum.
— Criss Jami, Healology
As understanding deepens, the further removed it becomes from knowledge.
— C.G. Jung, The Essential Jung: Selected Writings
among roses, be a rose, among thorns, be a thorn
— Idries Shah, The Sufis
Man can be categorized into three levels on social strata: One who are Consciously Unconscious, second who are Unconsciously Conscious - while both are inter-dependent for their survival; the third by and large a rare breed, Consciously Conscious sect – who don’t ever relate to this world!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
can I ask you a simple but complex question? Why are you still alive and living?
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Ah, but prophecies have a way of fulfilling themselves,' Khayman said. 'That's the magic of it. We all understood it in ancient times. The power of charms is the power of the will; you might say that we were all geniuses of psychology in those dark days, that we could be slain by the power of another's designs. And the dreams, Marius, the dreams are but a part of the great design.
— Anne Rice, The Queen of the Damned
The bigger the front, the bigger the back.
— Stephen Grosz
Yakov spent the whole day playing his fiddle; when it got completely dark, he took the notebook in which he recorded his losses daily, and out of boredom began adding up the yearly total. It came to over a thousand roubles. This astounded him so much that he flung the abacus to the floor and stamped his feet. Then he picked up the abacus, again clicked away for a long time, and sighed deeply and tensely. His face was purple and wet with sweat. He thought that if he could have put that lost thousand roubles in the bank, he would have earned at least forty roubles a year in interest. And therefore those forty roubles were a loss. In short, wherever you turned, there was nothing but losses every
— Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories
So, for example, Bell is mesmerized by a screen saver that draws on his personal archive to display random snapshots. Pictures of long-ago birthdays and family trips trigger waves of nostalgia. But during my visit, Bell tries to use search tools to find a particular photograph that is not coming up on the screen. He pursues one strategy, then another. Nothing works; he loses interest. One senses a new dynamic: when you depend on the computer to remember the past, you focus on whatever past is kept on the computer. And you learn to favor whatever past is easiest to find. My screen saver, my life.
— Alone Together Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
two great questions exist in each day; 'what must I do excellently today?' for morning and 'what did I do wrong or right today?' for evening. When we fail to know the real reasons why we wake up each day and why we retire at night, we fail to know the real reasons why we live.
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Mobile technology has made each of us "pausable.
— Alone Together Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
Pete says that his online marriage is an essential part of his "life mix." I ask him about this expression. I have never heard it before. Pete explains that the life mix is the mash-up of what you have on- and offline. Now, we ask not of our satisfactions in life but in our life mix. We have moved from multitasking to multi-lifing.
— Alone Together Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
We judge ourselves by our intentions but others by their actions. We tend to think other people's mistakes are caused by character flaws while our mistakes are due to situational factors. "I had a headache on the day of the examine, but he's not very smart." Then we have the opposite. Our good behavior is attributable to fundamental traits while other people's is temporary and situational. "I'm returning this wallet to lost and found because I'm a moral and ethical person. Others do so only if they're seen picking it up."Thus we own our strengths and disavow our weaknesses. This is a big obstetrical to overcoming self-destruction behavior, it justifies all our attempts to deny or put off our need to change and rationalizes the consequences of our actions.
— Richard O'Connor, PhD
The very fact that we now design and manufacture robot companions for the elderly marks a turning point. We ask technology to perform what used to be "love's labor": taking care of each other.
— Alone Together Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
The effects of overworking
— You forget which day it is.You think fast than what you write.
Disappointment cannot exist without expectation. “The expected apricot is never as sweet when it reaches the mouth.
— Idries Shah, The Magic Monastery: Analogical and Action Philosophy of the Middle East and Central Asia
There is something improbably about the silence in the [subway] carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging, condemning and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, as furtively as birds pecking grain. But only if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation's economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greetings-card companies.
— Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
Narrow behaviourist thinkingpermeates political and social policy and medical practice, thechildrearing advice dispensed by “parenting experts” and academicdiscourse. We keep trying to change people’s behaviours without a fullunderstanding of how and why those behaviours arise. “Inner causesare not the proper domain of psychology,” writes Roy Wise, an experton the psychology of addiction, and a prominent investigator in theNational Institute on Drug Abuse in the U.S.A.3 This statement seemsastonishing, coming from a psychologist. In reality, there can be nounderstanding of human beings, let alone of addicted human beings,without looking at “inner causes,” tricky as those causes can be to pindown at times. Behaviours, especially compulsive behaviours, areoften the active representations of emotional states and of specialkinds of brain functioning.As we have seen, the dominant emotional states and the brainpatterns of human beings are shaped by their early environment.Throughout their lifetimes, they are in dynamic interaction with varioussocial and emotional milieus. If we are to help addicts, we must striveto change not them but their environments. These are the only thingswe can change. Transformation of the addict must come from withinand the best we can do is to encourage it. Fortunately, there is muchthat we can do.
— Gabor Maté
A Sufi school comes into being in order to flourish and disappear, not to leave traces in mechanical ritual, or anthropologically survivals.
— Idries Shah, The Sufis
To embrace love, we risk heartbreak. To resist love, we risk emptiness.
— Jennifer Lane, Aced
I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.College transported me to a new town, where I tried, one more time, to reinvent myself. Becoming someone new, I could correct the errors of my past. At first I was optimistic: I could pull it off. But in the end, no matter where I went, I could never change. Over and over I made the same mistake, hurt other people, and hurt myself in the bargain.Just after I turned twenty, this thought hit me: Maybe I've lost the chance to ever be a decent human being. The mistakes I'd committed—maybe they were part of my very makeup, an inescapable part of my being. I'd hit rock bottom, and I knew it.
— Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
If you're rational you don't get to believe whatever you want to believe.
— Michael Huemer
A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally shortsighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman. Unfortunately, this realization does not seem to have penetrated very far - and our blindness is extremely dangerous.
— C.G. Jung, The Essential Jung: Selected Writings
Confirmation bias is the most effective way to go on living a lie.
— Criss Jami, Healology
The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgement go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases. But the moment the patient begins to assimilate contents that were previously unconscious, its danger diminishes. The dissociation of personality, the anxious division of the day-time and the night-time sides of the psyche, cease with progressive assimilation.
— C.G. Jung, The Essential Jung: Selected Writings
Do not think that your magic ring will work if you are not yourself Solomon.
— Idries Shah, Knowing How to Know: A Practical Philosophy in the Sufi Tradition
We all feel that the opposite of our own highest principle must be purely destructive, deadly, and evil. We refuse to endow it with any positive life-force; hence we avoid and fear it.
— C.G. Jung
The virtues developed here in the age range [around the age of 2] of are trust or faith, and will power and self determination according to the Erickson model. The existential questions being addressed here in this stage are, can one trust the world? and, is it alright to be myself?
— Leviak B. Kelly, The Leprechaun Delusion
Another potent ideological force is to deprecate the individual and exalt the collectivity of society. For since any given rule implies majority acceptance, any ideological danger to that rule can only start from one or a few independently-thinking individuals. The new idea, much less the new critical idea, must needs begin as a small minority opinion; therefore, the State must nip the view in the bud by ridiculing any view that defies the opinions of the mass. “Listen only to your brothers” or “adjust to society” thus become ideological weapons for crushing individual dissent. By such measures, the masses will never learn of the nonexistence of their Emperor’s clothes.
— Murray N. Rothbard, Anatomy of the State
The goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in individual development but in the policy of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside and consists in the execution of an abstract idea which ultimately tends to attract all life to itself.
— C.G. Jung, The Essential Jung: Selected Writings