c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
EXPECTATION If, from time to time, you give up expectation, you will be able to perceive what it is you are getting.
— Idries Shah, Reflections
Try and set yourself the task not to think of a white bear, and the cursed thing comes to mind every minute.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions
You must improve yourself on a higher level if you are to be able to help people, and not just weep over them.
— Idries Shah, Knowing How to Know: A Practical Philosophy in the Sufi Tradition
If you say it very softly, with a smile, you can get away with saying almost anything, even the truth.
— Neel Burton
May you find grace to endure every circumstance.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
There is something in man which can detect real love. We rub it out, or muffle it, by substitute-love.
— Idries Shah, Knowing How to Know: A Practical Philosophy in the Sufi Tradition
Psychology is more concerned with identifying the degree of mental disorder and less with its cure!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
The liar has a bad memory.
— Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams
We tend to suppress our anger against each other which ultimately leads to big quarrels some day. If two people have been naturally expressing their differences of opinion or having small arguments on regular basis, they will never have resentment or enmity of a lifetime.
— Deep Trivedi, The Pulse of Wisdom
But the shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but convention forbids!
— C.G. Jung
Worldview is often confused with perception; rather, it is our perception that influences our worldview.
— Asa Don Brown, The effects of childhood trauma on adult perception and worldview
The Thing about people who wanted to show you things was that sometimes their interest in granting you knowledge was laced with a little voyeuristic sadism. They were waiting for the Look or the Reaction, and they didn’t care what it was so long as it inflicted some kind of discomfort.
— Jeff VanderMeer, Authority
Whatever I fed to his mind, thinking it was nutrition was, in fact, poison. No matter how much a person likes or craves sugar, he should not be raised on the diet of only sugar ~ Rudransh Kashyap
— Kirtida Gautam, #iAm16iCan
Think or don't think, but don't think that you are thinking when you are postulating.
— Kirtida Gautam, #iAm16iCan
I am not the Hero of this story Bob is~ Aarush Kashyap
— Kirtida Gautam, #iAm16iCan
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.
— Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
As a nation we should look more carefully at how our fear of future acts of terrorism is undermining our quality of life.
— Bruce H. Lipton, The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles
The person who says it is lonely at the top has no idea what the view looks like from above. ~ Aarush Kashyap
— Kirtida Gautam, #iAm16iCan
If I wanted you to understand, I would have explained it better ~ Aarush Kashyap
— Kirtida Gautam
I get happy and I get sad,just like anybody elsebut they call this a disorder.
— Casey Renee Kiser, The Moon Said No
I see love as a force of nature. No matter how much you want to, you cannot control or demand love. No one can. It cannot be bought, bartered, or sold. It is priceless.
— Anna Agoncillo
Perception and worldview are one's summary of life.
— Asa Don Brown, The effects of childhood trauma on adult perception and worldview
Competence is the most effective tool to hide madness. Black holes actually appear to be the brightest stars in sky. ~ Aarush Kashyap
— Kirtida Gautam, #iAm16iCan
The essential quality of a market system, contrary to popular thinking, is not that it promotes greed; but rather, that it renders greed harmless.
— Israel M. Kirzner
People are perfectly capable of giving love even if they feel less confident about themselves.
— Anna Agoncillo, Psychology Of Love, Money, & Life
In terms of monetary behavior, there are two types of people in this Earth: those who save and those who spend.
— Anna Agoncillo, Psychology Of Love, Money, & Life
Most people think that if you do not love yourself fully, no one else will. That is not true. People are perfectly capable of giving love even if they feel less confident about themselves.
— Anna Agoncillo
...there is for many a poverty of play and cultural life because, although the person had a place for erudition, there was a relative failure on the part of those who constitute the child's world of persons to introduce cultural elements at the appropriate phases of the person's personality development.
— D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality
What we enjoy we enjoy, dispute is useless. ~ Aarush Kashyap
— Kirtida Gautam, #iAm16iCan
The sportification process of bodily practices of certain society, generates new physical manifestations, essentially different, which will help in another process: the indoctrination of subjects with capital values. And this process happens in the dark, without people having consciousness of it.
— Lucas Soares Adriano
Beneath the surface of the protective parts of trauma survivors there exists an undamaged essence, a Self that is confident, curious, and calm, a Self that has been sheltered from destruction by the various protectors that have emerged in their efforts to ensure survival. Once those protectors trust that it is safe to separate, the Self will spontaneously emerge, and the parts can be enlisted in the healing process
— Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Anyway, I don't trust those people who poke around sad people's minds and tell them how interesting it all is up there. It's not interesting.
— Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen
Life: sometimes the man on the saddle, sometimes the saddle on the man.
— Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams
It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative programme, on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off, than on any positive task. The contrast between the "we" and the "they", the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action. It is consequently always employed by those who seek, not merely support of a policy, but the unreserved allegiance of huge masses. From their point of view it has the great advantage of leaving them greater freedom of action than almost any positive programme.
— Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
In the distorting mirror of your mind, an angel can seem to have a devil's face.
— Idries Shah, Tales of the Dervishes: Teaching Stories of the Sufi Masters over the Past Thousand Years
If you are one of those people who can’t hold a lot in mind at once—you lose focus and start daydreaming in lectures, and have to get to someplace quiet to focus so you can use your working memory to its maximum—well, welcome to the clan of the creative. Having a somewhat smaller working memory means you can more easily generalize your learning into new, more creative combinations. Because you’re learning new, more creative combinations. Having a somewhat smaller working memory, which grows from the focusing abilities of the prefrontal cortex, doesn’t lock everything up so tightly, you can more easily get input from other parts of your brain. These other areas, which include the sensory cortex, not only are more in tune with what’s going on in the environment, but also are the source of dreams, not to mention creative ideas. You may have to work harder sometimes (or even much of the time) to understand what’s going on, but once you’ve got something chunked, you can take that chunk and turn it outside in and inside round—putting it through creative paces even you didn’t think you were capable of! 	Here’s another point to put into your mental chunker: Chess, that bastion of intellectuals, has some elite players with roughly average IQs. These seemingly middling intellects are able to do better than some more intelligent players because they practice more. That’s the key idea. Every chess player, whether average or elite, grows talent by practicing. It is the practice—particularly deliberate practice on the toughest aspects of the material—that can help lift average brains into the realm of those with more “natural” gifts. Just as you can practice lifting weights and get bigger muscles over time, you can also practice certain mental patterns that deepen and enlarge in your mind.
— Barbara Oakley
The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they, or at least the best among them, have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognised before.
— Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Arguing is a waste of time, because our attitudes need a quantum leap, not our knowledge. Arguing is a sport at best and a bad attitude at worst.
— Stefan Emunds
You are already the awakeness that you seek!
— Loch Kelly, Shift Into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Openhearted Awareness
The happiness of the superficial: when a man who has lost his donkey finds it again.
— Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams
Rest as the awareness that is aware without using thought.
— Loch Kelly, Shift Into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Openhearted Awareness
We can learn to return home to our open hearts at any moment.
— Loch Kelly, Shift Into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Openhearted Awareness
The big realization when we go beyond the ego is simply seeing that we've always been ok.
— Loch Kelly, Shift Into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Openhearted Awareness
All I know was that Dirva stayed with Liro in the days immediately after, and that it was Liro who slowly coaxed him back from the jaws of grief. Dirva had Liro, he had no one else, and it was then that I began to understand that the things we need from others make their own kind of sense, have their own logic, create their own legitimacy regardless of what we've been taught. If he hadn't had Liro, I am not sure Dirva would have been able to patch himself back together.I am grateful for this, but in the years since, I cannot help but wonder at the sacrifice it required of Liro. It is not easy to hold someone through their grief. It is hard to see someone you love in pain, in irreparable pain. It takes an extraordinary type of kindness, a rare patience, to let the loss run its course. We always want to help, but there are times when there is no help, and the pressure to take help only makes things harder on the ones trapped in mourning. I don't know what transpired between them. I don't. But I do know that Dirva left him without explanation, reappeared without warning, and that there was nothing for Liro to do but offer himself up. I never knew Liro well, but he seemed to me a very bright man. Like anyone who scraped a childhood by on the street and survived to adulthood, he had a watchfulness about him and an uncannily honed feel for other people. Liro knew the moment Dirva set foot in the City what he would need, and what he would take, and Liro let him take it anyway.
— B.R. Sanders, Ariah
INTEGRITY IS: Empirical knowledge is one of the critical ingredients of integrity, followed by truth, which is not necessarily moral, hence the evaluation of the truth. Empirical knowledge, coupled with the evaluation of truth for determination of its morality, equals factual righteousness and subsequently perpetuates integrity. Perceptions can at times influence our evaluation of truth, which may ultimately influence our identification of a subject’s morality. Our perception of what is truthful and righteous is not necessarily others interpretations. Assumption and credulity is the archenemy—the nemesis, if you will—of truth and ultimately of morality. We sometimes have an unwillingness or aversion toward researching a subject before formulating an opinion. But the more knowledge we learn about a subject, the more beneficial it will be. Understanding based on factual data will enable a more realistic and enhanced resolution of questions about a subject’s morality.Do some investigation of facts, situations, ideology, and belief systems for your empirical knowledge. As you do so, the truth shall be brought to the surface. As you analyze empirical knowledge, the truth and its morality will determine the factual righteousness of the subject, and ultimately, its integrity.Integrity Equation:Empirical knowledge + truth + morality = factual righteousness = INTEGRITY
— I.Alan Appt
Evolution is central to the understanding of life, including human life. Like all living things, we are outcomes of natural selection; we got here because we inherited traits that allowed our ancestors to survive, find mates, and reproduce. This momentous fact explains our deepest strivings: why having a thankless child is sharper than a serpent's tooth, why it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, why we do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light
— Steven Pinker
It is fascinating to discover that individuals who are asked to assign a punishment to a criminal are influenced by factors that they are unaware of (like the presence of a flag in the room) or that they would consciously diavow (like the color of the criminal's skin). It is boring to find that individuals' proposed punishments are influenced by rational considerations such as the severity of the crime and the criminal's previous record. Interesting: we are more willing to help someonw if there is the smell of fresh bread in the air. Boring: we are more willing to help someone if he or she has been kind to us in the past. We sometimes forget that this bias in publication exists and take what is reported in scientific journals and the popular press as an accurate reflection of our best science of how the mind works. But this is like watching the nightly news and concluding that rape, robbery, and murder are part of any individual's everyday life - forgetting that the nightly news doesn't report the vast majority of cases where nothing of this sort happens at all.
— Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil
Nothing speeds brain atrophy more than being immobilized in the same environment: the monotony undermines our dopamine and attentional systems crucial to our brain plasticity.
— Norman Doidge
By far, the most important distortions and confabulations of memory are those that serve to justify and explain our own lives. The mind, sense-making organ that it is, does not interpret our experiences as if they were shattered shards of glass; it assembles them into a mosaic. From the distance of years, we see the mosaic’s pattern. It seems tangible, unchangeable; we can’t imagine how we could reconfigure those pieces into another design. But it is a result of years of telling our story, shaping it into a life narrative that is complete with heroes and villians, an account of how we came to be the way we are. Because that narrative is the way we understand the world and our place in it, it is bigger than the sum of its parts. If on part, one memory, is shown to be wrong, people have to reduce the resulting dissonance and even rethink the basic mental category: you mean Dad (Mom) wasn’t such a bad (good) person after all? You mean Dad (Mom) was a complex human being? The life narrative may be fundamentally true; Your father or mother might really have been hateful, or saintly. The problem is that when the narrative becomes a major source of self-justification, one the storyteller relies on to excuse mistakes and failings, memory becomes warped in its service. The storyteller remembers only the confirming examples of the parent’s malevolence and forgets the dissonant instances of the parent’s good qualities. Over time, as the story hardens, it becomes more difficult to see the whole parent — the mixture of good and bad, strengths and flaws, good intentions and unfortunate blunders.Memories create our stories, but our stories also create our memories.
— Carol Tavris
To bind one free man with love is better than to release a thousand slaves.
— Idries Shah, The Dermis Probe
What the new science of anthrozoology reveals is that our attitudes, behaviors, and relationships with the animals in our lives- the ones we love, the ones we hate, and the ones we eat- are, likewise, more complicated than we thought.
— Hal Herzog, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals
The only consistency in the way humans think about animals is inconsistency.
— Hal Herzog
He discards a quilt for fear of bugs.
— Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams
To show how memory changes to fit our story, psychologists study how memories evolve over time: if your memories of the same people change, becoming positive or negative spending on what is happening in your life now, then it’s all about you, not them. This process happens so gradually that it can be a jolt to realize you ever felt differently.
— Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts
Why read fiction when real life can be just as interesting?
— LHandLG, Stolen Inheritance - A True Story of Oil, Army and Murder
In the area of linguistics, there are major languagegroups: Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, English, Portuguese,Greek, German, French, and so on. Most of us grow uplearning the language of our parents and siblings, whichbecomes our primary or native tongue. Later, we may learnadditional languages but usually with much more effort.These become our secondary languages. We speak andunderstand best our native language. We feel mostcomfortable speaking that language. The more we use asecondary language, the more comfortable we becomeconversing in it. If we speak only our primary language andencounter someone else who speaks only his or herprimary language, which is different from ours, ourcommunication will be limited. We must rely on pointing,grunting, drawing pictures, or acting out our ideas. We cancommunicate, but it is awkward. Language differences arepart and parcel of human culture. If we are to communicateeffectively across cultural lines, we must learn the languageof those with whom we wish to communicate.In the area of love, it is similar. Your emotional lovelanguage and the language of your spouse may be asdifferent as Chinese from English. No matter how hard youtry to express love in English, if your spouse understandsonly Chinese, you will never understand how to love eachother. My friend on the plane was speaking the language of“Affirming Words” to his third wife when he said, “I told herhow beautiful she was. I told her I loved her. I told her howproud I was to be her husband.” He was speaking love, andhe was sincere, but she did not understand his language.Perhaps she was looking for love in his behavior and didn’tsee it. Being sincere is not enough. We must be willing tolearn our spouse’s primary love language if we are to beeffective communicators of love.
— Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate
A man must be a Salomon before his magical ring will work
— Idries Shah, The Way of the Sufi
The process of learning is the process of discovering what really exists.
— Idries Shah, The World of the Sufi: An Anthology of Writings about Sufis and Their Work
How many friends would you have if you went from one to another asking them to conceal a dead body?
— Idries Shah, Sufi Thought and Action
The door of illumination is open to those for whom other doors are closed.
— Idries Shah, The Commanding Self
The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people's behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of situation and context.
— Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Hit your hand on a stone and expect it to hurt.
— Idries Shah, The Dermis Probe
A synthesis—an abstraction, chunk, or gist idea—is a neural pattern. Good chunks form neural patterns that resonate, not only within the subject we’re working in, but with other subjects and areas of our lives. The abstraction helps you transfer ideas from one area to another. That’s why great art, poetry, music, and literature can be so compelling. When we grasp the chunk, it takes on a new life in our own minds—we form ideas that enhance and enlighten the neural patterns we already possess, allowing us to more readily see and develop other related patterns. Once we have created a chunk as a neural pattern, we can more easily pass that chunked pattern to others, as Cajal and other great artists, poets, scientists, and writers have done for millennia, Once other people grasp that chunk, not only can they use it, but also they can more easily create similar chunks that apply to other areas in their lives—an important part of the creative process.
— Barbara Oakley, A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science
If you are one of those people who can’t hold a lot in mind at once—you lose focus and start daydreaming in lectures, and have to get to someplace quiet to focus so you can use your working memory to its maximum—well, welcome to the clan of the creative. Having a somewhat smaller working memory means you can more easily generalize your learning into new, more creative combinations. Because your learning new, more creative combinations. Having a somewhat smaller working memory, which grows from the focusing abilities of the prefrontal cortex, doesn’t lock everything up so tightly, you can more easily get input from other parts of your brain. These other areas, which include the sensory cortex, not only are more in tune with what’s going on in the environment, but also are the source of dreams, not to mention creative ideas. You may have to work harder sometimes (or even much of the time) to understand what’s going on, but once you’ve got something chunked, you can take that chunk and turn it outside in and inside round—putting it through creative paces even you didn’t think you were capable of! Here’s another point to put into your mental chunker: Chess, that bastion of intellectuals, has some elite players with roughly average IQs. These seemingly middling intellects are able to do better than some more intelligent players because they practice more. That’s the key idea. Every chess player, whether average or elite, grows talent by practicing. It is the practice—particularly deliberate practice on the toughest aspects of the material—that can help lift average brains into the realm of those with more “natural” gifts. Just as you can practice lifting weights and get bigger muscles over time, you can also practice certain mental patterns that deepen and enlarge in your mind.
— Barbara Oakley
Healthy people have healthy boundaries. Unhealthy people, well, let’s not get into that. It’s like this: some people have walls which means they let no one in. This equals unhealthy. Some people let everyone in and let themselves be stepped all over. This equals unhealthy.
— Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate...Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
A myth is something that has never happened, but is happening all the time.
— Joseph Campbell
It is human nature to strive.
— Temple Grandin
Patience is bitter, but bears a sweet fruit.
— Idries Shah, The Dermis Probe
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaWisdom: Something you can learn without knowing it.
— Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams
The hardest chore to do, and to do right, is to think. Why do you think the common man would choose labor, partially, as a distraction from his own thoughts? It is because that level of stress, he most absolutely abhors.
— Criss Jami, Healology
I want you to trust me," Gabe whispered against her lips.Lauren closed her eyes and fought the urge to kiss him. "I still don't."Gabe laughed. "Yeah, you do. You might not want to, but you do.
— Kishan Paul, Blind Love
Today everyone on our side knows that criminality is not the result of the Algerian's congenital nature nor the configuration of his nervous system. The war in Algeria and wars of national liberation bring out the true protagonists. We have demonstrated that in the colonial situation the colonized are confronted with themselves. They tend to use each other as a screen. Each prevents his neighbor from seeing the national enemy. And when exhausted after a sixteen-hour day of hard work the colonized subject collapses on his mat and a child on the other side of the canvas partition cries and prevents him from sleeping, it just so happens it's a little Algerian. When he goes to beg for a little semolina or a little oil from the shopkeeper to whom he already owes several hundred francs and his request is turned down, he is overwhelmed by an intense hatred and desire to kill—and the shopkeeper happens to be an Algerian. When, after weeks of keeping a low profile, he finds himself cornered one day by the kaid demanding "his taxes," he is not even allowed the opportunity to direct his hatred against the European administrator; before him stands the kaid who excites his hatred—and he happens to be an Algerian.
— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Because sugar is not arsenic, many graves are full.
— Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams
We all do things in a certain individual way, according to our temperaments. Every human act — no matter how large or how small— is a direct expression of  a man's personality, and bears the inevitable impress of his nature.
— S.S. Van Dine
I began to see that the stronger a therapy emphasized feelings, self-esteem, and self-confidence, the more dependent the therapist was upon his providing for the patient ongoing, unconditional, positive regard. The more self-esteem was the end, the more the means, in the form of the patient’s efforts, had to appear blameless in the face of failure. In this paradigm, accuracy and comparison must continually be sacrificed to acceptance and compassion; which often results in the escalation of bizarre behavior and bizarre diagnoses.The bizarre behavior results from us taking credit for everything that is positive and assigning blame elsewhere for anything negative. Because of this skewed positive-feedback loop between our judged actions and our beliefs, we systematically become more and more adapted to ourselves, our feelings, and our inaccurate solitary thinking; and less and less adapted to the environment that we share with our fellows. The resultant behavior, such as crying, depression, displays of temper, high-risk behavior, or romantic ventures, or abandonment of personal responsibilities, which seem either compulsory, necessary, or intelligent to us, will begin to appear more and more irrational to others.The bizarre diagnoses occur because, in some cases, if a ‘cause disease’ (excuse from blame) does not exist, it has to be 'discovered’ (invented). Psychiatry has expanded its diagnoses of mental disease every year to include 'illnesses’ like kleptomania and frotteurism [now frotteuristic disorder in the DSM-V]. (Do you know what frotteurism is? It is a mental disorder that causes people, usually men, to surreptitiously fondle women’s breasts or genitals in crowded situations such as elevators and subways.)The problem with the escalation of these kinds of diagnoses is that either we can become so adapted to our thinking and feelings instead of our environment that we will become dissociated from the whole idea that we have a problem at all; or at least, the more we become blameless, the more we become helpless in the face of our problems, thinking our problems need to be 'fixed’ by outside help before we can move forward on our own.For 2,000 years of Western culture our problems existed in the human power struggle constantly being waged between our principles and our primal impulses. In the last fifty years we have unprincipled ourselves and become what I call 'psychologized.’ Now the power struggle is between the 'expert’ and the 'disorder.’ Since the rise of psychiatry and psychology as the moral compass, we don’t talk about moral imperatives anymore, we talk about coping mechanisms. We are not living our lives by principles so much as we are living our lives by mental health diagnoses. This is not working because it very subtly undermines our solid sense of self.
— A.B. Curtiss, Depression Is a Choice: Winning the Battle Without Drugs
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaPoverty: The result of marriage.
— Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams
...even though we do not have the wisdom to enumerate the reasons for the behaviour of another person, we can grant that every individual does have his private world of meaning, conceived out of the integrity and dignity of his personality.
— Virginia M. Axline
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaPenitent: Someone who has been made incapable of enjoying himself.
— Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams
Would you like to be best of the worst or the worst of the best?
— Kishan P Rao
...it is impossible to reason people out of affiliations they have not been reasoned into.
— George Will
I think she must have lived where all the sad poets live, in that secret place where everything hurts all the time.
— Ross Thomas
Pride is born as a mountaintop on a valley, but dies as an abyss in which it is too deep and too dark to see the better.
— Criss Jami, Healology
Need is what tears people apart. When you want someone, you never really need them. But as soon as you start need someone, they no longer want you.
— Mohadesa Najumi
...whatever God found worth creating we can find worth studying.
— David G. Myers, Malcolm A. Jeeves
We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.
— Sigmund Freud
Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza. Worry: Something to make you unnecessarily ill.
— Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams
Need is what tears people apart. When you want someone, you never really need them. But as soon as you start to need someone, they no longer want you.
— Mohadesa Najumi
If you have no troubles – buy a goat.
— Idries Shah, The Dermis Probe
The subconscious has good data and poor judgement.
— Sarah Thiessen, Splankna
Sarah, insight doesn't produce change.
— Sarah Thiessen
the parts of the brain corresponding to the limbic system (thought to respond only to more visceral, immediate rewards) were activated only when the decision involved comparing a reward today with one in the future. In contrast, the lateral prefrontal cortex (a more “calculating” part of the brain) responded with a similar intensity to all decisions, regardless of the timing of the options. Brains that work like this would produce a lot of failed good intentions. And indeed, we do see a lot of those, from New Year’s resolutions to gym memberships that lie unused.
— Abhijit V. Banerjee, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
I am small.So are stars from a distance. It's all a matter of perspective.
— C. Kennedy, Slaying Isidore's Dragons
All violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.
— James Gilligan
It is strange... the reasons one feels he doesn't deserve things.
— C. Kennedy, Slaying Isidore's Dragons
Saying of the ProphetUnderstandingSpeak to everyone in accordance with his degree of understanding.
— Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams
One can learn from what is not said.
— C. Kennedy, Slaying Isidore's Dragons
Patience is a garment which has never worn out.
— Idries Shah, The Dermis Probe
Surprisingly, it is often when wandering through the emotional carnage left by the worst of humankind that we find the best of humanity ad well.
— Bruce D. Perry
The processing of universals is the job of the unconscious. If we feed it the opposite it breaks
—  when it breaks we break and the people around us break.
The environment acts more strongly upon the individual life the less fixed and strong this individual life may be.
— Maria Montessori
Unprovoked hostility is often but displaced self-defense: 'I must stop him before he stops me.' In many of such environments, nobody is really hateful so much as they are just fearful.
— Criss Jami, Healology
Poor greedy one, wherever he runs He's after food, and death is after him.(Saadi)
— Idries Shah, The Dermis Probe
People form close friendships by knowing private things about each other, and the reason most people don't make close friends is because they're too embarrassed to share anything really important about themselves.
— Eliezer Yudkowsky
There are people, of course, who think it unscientific to take anything seriously; they do not want their intellectual playground disturbed by graver considerations. But the doctor who fails to take account of man's feelings for values commits a serious blunder, and if he tries to correct the mysterious and well-nigh inscrutable workings of nature with his so-called scientific attitude, he is merely putting his shallow sophistry in place of nature's healing processes.
— C.G. Jung, Dreams
Imagine a psychiatrist sitting down with a broken human being saying, I am here for you, I am committed to your care, I want to make you feel better, I want to return your joy to you, I don't know how I will do it but I will find out and then I will apply one hundred percent of my abilities, my training, my compassion and my curiosity to your health -- to your well-being, to your joy. I am here for you and I will work very hard to help you. I promise. If I fail it will me my failure, not yours. I am the professional. I am the expert. You are experiencing great pain right now and it is my job and my mission to cure you from your pain. I am absolutely committed to your care... I know you are suffering. I know you are afraid, I love you. I want to cure you and I won't stop trying to help you. You are my patient. I am your doctor. You are my patient. Imagine a doctor phoning you at all hours of the day and night to tell you that he or she had been reading some new stuff on the subject of whatever and was really excited about how it might help you. Imagine a doctor calling you in an important meeting and saying listen, I'm so sorry to bother you but I"ve been thinking really hard about your problems and I'd like to try something completely new. I need to see you immediately! I"m absolutely committed to your care! I think this might help you. I won't give up on you.
— Miriam Toews
You realize your true identity as consciousness itself, rather than what consciousness has identified with. That's the peace of God. The ultimate truth of who you are is not I am this or I am that, but I Am.
— Eckhart Tolle
Hatred and disdain do harm to the donor not the intended recipient…The Strength in Knowing ----- by I. Alan Appt
— I. Alan Appt, The Strength in Knowing
It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.
— Donna Tartt
An arguing couple spiraling into negativity and teetering on the brink of divorce is actually mathematically equivalent to the beginning of a nuclear war.
— Hannah Fry
We are a biological species arising from Earth’s biosphere as one adapted species among many; and however splendid our languages and cultures, however rich and subtle our minds, however vast our creative powers, the mental process is the product of a brain shaped by the hammer of natural selection upon the anvil of nature.
— Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature
...co-rumination: the problem of talking too much about anything. Specifically,... when girls rehash their problems excessively, it leads to depression, anxiety, and a sense of hopelessness.
— Levine, Irene S.
With practice, INTJs become skilled at nodding and making responsive noises at appropriate times,while internally wondering whether dolphins have language or thinking about how Star Wars breaksthe laws of physics.
— Anna Moss
The internet and online communication is the window into your world - but real life, in person communication / connection is the door.
— Rasheed Ogunlaru
Lies don't make you happy. They just make you lie about being happy.
— Stefan Molyneux
Saying of the ProphetThe TongueA man slips with his tongue more than with his feet.
— Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams
Saying of the ProphetThe JudgeA man appointed to be a judge has been killed without a knife.
— Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams
Saying of the ProphetAngerYou ask for a piece of advice. I tell you: 'Do not get angry.' He is strong who can withhold anger.
— Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams
Some wounds; never reflects on the skin, but kills us slowly from inside.
— Durgesh Satpathy
But I remember one thing: it wasn't me that started acting deaf, it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all.
— Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Envy is a sign of insecurity, yes; but so is longing to be envied.
— Criss Jami, Healology
In simple, the past is a time gone by and no longer exists in the present moment, but we choose to allow this past to occupy our minds, our bodies and our very existence.
— Asa Don Brown
The loss of a child exploits the emotions of each individual it encounters.
— Asa Don Brown
Letting go of the past, is like opening the flood gates of healing to be set free.
— Asa Don Brown
The benefits of forgiveness are limitless.
— Asa Don Brown
An anchor should be someone who is personally open and willing to communicate.
— Asa Don Brown
Saying of the ProphetEnvyEnvy devours good deeds, as a fire devours fuel.
— Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams
It's not a secret that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.
— Lee Johnson
To swear day and night by media slander will make one a bigger victim than the slandered. It doesn't take much to begin to fear a mere illusion of human badness.
— Criss Jami, Healology
I had a dream. In the dream someone was critical of my newest novel The Snail's Castle. I said, "don't worry about it. If you don't like it, just throw it out the window." I awoke, grinning, with a wonderful feeling of freedom.
— Mark  Gordon, The Snail's Castle
Institutionalized:Ghetto stars pimped so hard for so long -- they'll starve to pimp themselves behind psychic bars.
— T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"
There is a wager that we must all make; for the small stake of some rewarding mental training, we can attain lasting contentment and contribute to a positive outcome for our planet.
— Neil Hayes, A View From A Lake: Buddha, Mind and Future
The sight of somebody meditating needs to become commonplace.
— Neil Hayes, A View From A Lake: Buddha, Mind and Future
This time once again it has been my chief aim to make no sacrifice to an appearance of being simple, complete or rounded off, not to disguise problems and not to deny the existence of gaps and uncertainties. In no other scientific field would it be necessary to boast of such modest intentions. They are universally regarded as self-evident; the public expects nothing else. No reader of an account of astronomy will feel disappointed and contemptuous of the science if he is shown the frontiers at which our knowledge of the universe melts into haziness. Only in psychology is it otherwise. There mankind's constitutional unfitness for scientific research comes fully into the open. What people seem to demand of psychology is not progress in knowledge, but satisfactions of some other sort; every unsolved problem, every admitted uncertainty is made into a reproach against it.Whoever cares for the science of mental life must accept these injustices along with it.
— Sigmund Freud
Here lies the partner's salvation: if you, as his intimate, wish to sever your relationship with the narcissist, stop providing him with what he needs. Do not adore, admire, approve, applaud, or confirm anything he does or says. Disagree with his views belittle him, reduce him to size, compare him to others, tell him he is not unique, criticize him, give unsolicited advice, and offer him help. In short, deprive him of the grandiose and fantastic illusions, which holds his personality together.The narcissist is a delicately attuned piece of equipment. At the first sign of danger to his inflated False Self, he will quit and disappear on you.
— Sam Vaknin, Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited
Sometimes people who adamantly assert an opinion or view don't even hold it themselves.
— David J. Lieberman
Vengeance against predators is meals on wheels.
— Stefan Molyneux
The concept of the psychopath is, in fact, an admission of failure to solve the mystery of evil—it is merely a restatement of the mystery—and only offers an escape valve for the frustration felt by psychiatrists, social workers, and police officers, who daily encounter its force.
— Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer
The guilty are uncomfortable with silence.
— David J. Lieberman
This scene expresses the basic situation of immaturity; lyricism is an attempt to face that situation: the individual expelled from the protected enclosure of childhood wishes to enter the world, but at the same time, because he is frightened of it, he fashions an artificial replacement world out of his own verse. He makes his poems revolve around him like the planets around the sun; he becomes the center of a small universe in which nothing is alien, in which he feels as much at home as a child inside its mother, for everything here is fashioned only from the substance of his soul. Here he can accomplish everything that is so difficult "outside;" here he can, like the student Wolker, march with a proletarian crowd to make a revolution and, like the virginal Rimbaud, lash his "little girlfriends" because that crowd and those girlfriends are not fashioned out of the hostile substance of an alien world but out of the substance of his own dreams, and they are thus he himself and do not shatter the unity of the universe he has constructed for himself.
— Milan Kundera
Cognitive insight (knowing something) is not like emotional insight (feeling something). It has no psychodynamic effects. It does not affect the narcissist's behavior patterns, or his interpersonal interactions - the products of well entrenched and rigid defense mechanisms.
— Sam Vaknin, Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited
What you are seeking in your retreat, I see clearly in every road and alleyway.
— Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
Such is the great nature of man, it resides the true face beneath a glittering masquerade.
— K. Hari Kumar, That Frequent Visitor
Even sleep offered no respite from my mental disorders. There was Nightmare Disorder, which is diagnosed when the sufferer dreams of being "pursued or declared a failure." All my nightmares involve someone chasing me down the street while yelling, "You're a failure!
— Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
The need to create a citadel in which to hide from the world is characteristic of people with a schizoid disposition
— Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction
When I became too much myself, I had to change my life.
— Abby Norman
Projections' - attempts to blame all and sundry for my own past folly - will be found of no avail, and we must learn to withdraw them. None other is to blame for our body, home or circumstance, our friends and enemies, our job and place in the world. We made it all; let us accept and use and better it.
— Christmas Humphreys, The Buddhist Way Of Life
Each one of us is hard at war - within. We must face this battlefield; withdraw, as the psychologist would say, our habitual projections of that strife from the world around us, and realize that we should be so busy killing the selfishness within that we really have not the time, much less the will to blow up our neighbour. And when a few more individuals recognize that the war within implies a friendly tolerance of those about one, and of their ways of living and internal fighting, the Hitlers and Stalins and even the unpleasant fellow next door may provoke in everyman a smile, rather than an H-bomb, or even a bow and arrow.
— Christmas Humphreys, The Buddhist Way Of Life
You don't love me.. Believe me! You don't love anyone. How could you? And no one loves you. How could they? Except me, it's only because I love you that I'm telling you all this. I Love you.. R. D. Laing.
— R.D. Laing
Progression and regression go hand in hand with mental health. It is a tough illness. You often take one step forward and ten steps back.
— Theresa Larsen, Cutting the Soul: A journey into the mental illness of a teenager through the eyes of his mother
Excerpt from my lecture Sunday at Soul-Esteem Center10 Commandments - God knew when he gave us choice some would make the wrong choices, but God wanted his creation, man, to have free will and felt later it necessary to write the 10 Commandants as a reminder of how God wanted his creations to perform. The 10 Commandants contain 5 positives and five negatives
— I. Alan Appt, The Strength in Knowing
I'm psychologically equipped for this.
— A. Ashley Straker, Infected Connection
He had scores to settle with the world, and she, at that moment, was world enough for him.
— John Banville
In the realm of Greater Understanding, the workshop is dismantled after the work is finished.
— Idries Shah, The Way of the Sufi
Most magick I have experienced can be written off as a stew of psychology and coincidence, and I truly believe this is where magick is best worked.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft
My mind is so clever, but it does me no favors.
— Anonymous
Pain is always a fanged serpent, but to the fearful it has a hundred heads.
— Dagobert D. Runes, A Dictionary of Thought
Memories demand attention, and these memories will have teeth.
— C. Kennedy, Slaying Isidore's Dragons
Being in a state of denial is auniversally human response tosituations which threaten tooverwhelm. People who were abusedas children sometimes carry theirdenial like precious cargo without aport of destination. It enabled us tosurvive our childhood experiences, and often we still live in survival mode decades beyond the actual abuse. We protect ourselves to excess because we learned abruptly and painfully that no one else would.
— Sarah E. Olson, Becoming One: A Story of Triumph Over Dissociative Identity Disorder
Boundary construction is most evident in three-year-olds. Boundary construction is most evident in three-year-olds. By this time, they should have mastered the following tasks:1. The ability to be emotionally attached to others, yet without giving up a sense of self and one‘s freedom to be apart, 2. The ability to say appropriate no's to others without fear of loss of love, 3. The ability to take appropriate no's from others without withdrawing emotionally. Noting these tasks, a friend said half-joking, "They need to learn this by age three? How about by fourty-three?" Yes, these are tall orders but boundary development is essential in the early years of life.
— Henry Cloud, Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life