On Resilience and Self-Determination, Freedom and Change
“I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.” Carl Jung (1875-1961), Swiss psychiatrist
"If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you better teach it to dance." George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish playwright
"Only by acceptance of the past will you alter its meaning." T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), American-born British poet and essayist in The Cocktail Party (1949)
"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you." Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), French Existentialist philosopher, playwright, activist
"The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new." Socrates
"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our power to choose our response, and in our response lies our growth and our freedom." Viktor E. Frankl (1905-1977), Austrian psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, Existentialist philosopher, founder of Logotherapy, in Man's Search for Meaning (1946)
“We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.” Jean-Paul Sartre
"To be nobody but yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting." e.e. cummings (1894-1962), American poet
On Family and Relationships
"Nobody's family can hang out the sign 'Nothing the matter here'." Chinese proverb
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
"When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory." Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher
"Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born." Anaïs Nin (1903-1977), French-born American author
"We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit." e.e. cummings
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” Carl Jung
"The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others." Erik Erikson (1902-1994), American psychologist
"The art of listening is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive." Alan Watts (1915-1973), British-born philosopher, theologian, interpreter of Zen Buddhism
On Feeling and Thinking
"What makes us men [sic] is that we can think logically. What makes us human is that we sometimes choose not to." Dame Antonia Susan Duffy aka A. S. Byatt (1936- ), English novelist and poet, in The Virgin in the Garden
"Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you." Roger Ebert (1942-2013), American film critic
"Please remember, it is what you are that heals, not what you know." Carl Jung
"To cherish secrets and hold back emotion is a psychic misdemeanor for which nature finally revisits with sickness." Carl Jung
On Grief and Loss
"Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak Whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break." William Shakespeare
“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow; but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.” Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Russian novelist
"To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering." Friedrich Nietzsche
"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths." Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004), Swiss-American psychiatrist
"It has been said that grief is a kind of madness. I disagree. There is a sanity to grief, in its just proportion of emotion to cause, that madness does not have. Grief, given to all, is a generative and human thing....Grief, said C. S. Lewis, is like “a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.” This is so. The lessons that come from grief come from its unexpected moves, from its shifting views of what has gone before and what is yet to come. Pain brought so often into one’s consciousness cannot maintain the same capacity to wound. Grief conspires to ensure that it will in time wear itself out. Unlike depression, it acts to preserve the self. Depression is malignant, indiscriminately destructive. Grief may bear resemblance to depression, but it is a distant kinship...Grief, like depression, is a journey one must take largely unattended. I pulled in my dreams and kept company with the past. The future was set aside, put in abeyance. I had less energy, but enough to see me through. This is never so in depression. Weariness pervades the marrow when one is depressed; it is what renders despair intolerable. I bled out during my depressions. This was not so after [my husband] died. My heart broke, but it beat." Kay Redfield Jamison (1946- ), American clinical psychologist and author, in Nothing Was the Same (2009)
On Vulnerability and Pain
"This tenderness for life, bodhichitta, awakens when we no longer shield ourselves from the vulnerability of our condition, from the basic fragility of existence. It awakens through kinship with the suffering of others. We train in the bodhichitta practices in order to become so open that we can take the pain of the world in, let it touch our hearts, and turn it into compassion." Pema Chödrön (1936- ), American Tibetan Buddhist
“Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"Then the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." Anaïs Nin
"If you get rid of the pain before you have answered its questions, you get rid of the self along with it." Carl Jung
"This is what I have found: to let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen; to love with our whole hearts, even though there's no guarantee -- and that's really hard, and I can tell you as a parent, that's excruciatingly difficult -- to practice gratitude and joy in those moments of kind of terror, when we're wondering, 'Can I love you this much? Can I believe in this passionately? Can I be this fierce about this?' just to be able to stop and, instead of catastrophizing what might happen, to say, 'I'm just so grateful, because to feel this vulnerable means I'm alive.' And the last, which I think is probably the most important, is to believe that we're enough. Because when we work from a place I believe that says, 'I'm enough,' then we stop screaming and start listening, we're kinder and gentler to the people around us, and we're kinder and gentler to ourselves." Brené Brown, American social work researcher-storyteller, in her June 2010 TED talk titled "The Power of Vulnerability"
"When so many are lonely, as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone." Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), American playwright, in Camino Real
"When Death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity." George Eliot (pen name of Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880), English novelist and journalist
On Fear and Courage
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), German poet
"Fear is the mother of morality." Friedrich Nietzsche
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." Anaïs Nin
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.” Mark Twain
"The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity." Erich Fromm (1900-1980), German social psychologist
"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult." Seneca the Younger (4 B.C.-A.D. 65), Roman stoic philosopher, dramatist, and statesman
"It's very simple: There is only one requirement for any of us, and that is to be courageous. Because courage, as you might know, defines all other human behavior. And I believe, because I've done a little bit myself, pretending to be courageous is just as good as the real thing." David Letterman, September 19, 2001 (first Late Night show back on the air after 9/11)
On Shame
"You show me a woman who can actually sit with a man in real vulnerability and fear, I'll show you a woman who's done incredible work. You show me a man who can sit with a woman who's just had it, she can't do it all anymore, and his first response is not, 'I unloaded the dishwasher,' but he really listens -- because that's all we need -- I'll show you a guy who's done a lot of work. Shame is an epidemic in our culture. And to get out from underneath it, to find our way back to each other, we have to understand how it affects us and how it affects the way we're parenting, the way we're working, the way we're looking at each other....If we're going to find our way back to each other, we have to understand and know empathy, because empathy's the antidote to shame. If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive. The two most powerful words when we're in struggle: Me too." Brené Brown, in March 2012 TED talk, "Listening to Shame"
"It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous.
Resign yourself to be the fool you are.
The one thing to do is to do nothing. Wait...
You will find that you survive humiliation
And that's an experience of incalculable value....
I have had quite enough humiliation
Lately, to bring me to the point
At which humiliation ceases to humiliate.
You get to the point at which you cease to feel
And then you speak your mind."
T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party (1949)
On Success
“Success is not the key to happiness; happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” Anonymous
"If you win the rat race, you're still a rat." Lily Tomlin (1939- ), American comedian and actress
“Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.” Anonymous
"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." Albert Einstein (1879-1955), German-born American physicist
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), in his "Citizenship in a Republic" speech at the Sorbonne in Paris, April 23, 1910
"Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all." Dale Carnegie (1888-1955), American writer and lecturer on self-improvement
On Love
"The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return." George Aberle, known as eden ahbez (1908-1995), early hippie, lyricist and composer, from his song "Nature Boy" (made famous by Nat King Cole, 1948)
"If you want to be loved, love." Seneca the Elder (54 B.C.-37 A.D.), Roman rhetorician (and I would add, by extension: If you want to be respected, respect; if you want to be trusted, trust; if you want to be heard, listen; if you want to be acknowledged and remembered, acknowledge and remember.)
"[Love is] two solitudes protecting, touching, and saluting each other." Rainer Maria Rilke
“Love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity.” Erich Fromm
"Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'" Erich Fromm
On Trust
"Everything you want lies on the other side of learning to trust yourself." Vironika Tugaleva, Ukrainian-American author
"...Only trust in yourself and in this world / can carry you past the watchdogs of your fears / and out of the iron gates of the already-known." Arthur Deikman (1929-2013), American professor of psychiatry
"I do not trust people who don't love themselves and yet tell me, 'I love you.' There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt." Maya Angelou (1928-2014), African-American poet and author
On Self-Awareness and Honoring One's Self
"The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are." Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), American mythologist
"You can outdistance that which is running after you, but you cannot outdistance that which is running inside you." African proverb
"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), American essayist and poet
"We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are." Anaïs Nin
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." Friedrich Nietzsche
"We can never be born enough. We are human beings; for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery, the mystery of growing: the mystery that happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves." e. e. cummings
"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." Theodor Seuss Geisel aka Dr. Seuss (1904-1991), American writer and cartoonist
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away." Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), American author, poet, abolitionist, transcendental philosopher
On Serenity
“One must learn to love oneself…with a wholesome and healthy love, so that one can bear to be with oneself and need not roam.” Friedrich Nietzsche
"All generalizations are false, including this one. I have discovered that all human evil and the sole cause of man's unhappiness comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room." Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), French mathematician, writer, philosopher, in Pensées
"God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, Courage to change the things which should be changed, and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. Living one day at a time, Enjoying one moment at a time, Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace..." The Serenity Prayer, attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), American theologian and ethicist
“It’s not the load that breaks you down; it’s the way you carry it.” Lena Horne (1917-2010), African-American singer, actress, and civil rights activist
"Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is." Thomas Szasz (1920-2012), American psychiatrist
On Despair and Hope
"What we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope." George Eliot, in Middlemarch
"He who has never hoped can never despair." George Bernard Shaw, in Caesar and Cleopatra
"He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God." Aeschylus (525-455 B.C.), Greek playwright
"Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for." Joseph Addison (1672-1719), English essayist, poet, playwright
"All doubt, despair and fear become insignificant once the intention of life becomes love." Rumi (1207-1273), Persian poet, theologian and Sufi mystic
"If you are wise, mingle these two elements: do not hope without despair, or despair without hope." Seneca the Younger, in Letter CIV: On care of health and peace of mind
"In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window." Barbara Kingsolver (1955- ), American novelist, essayist and poet
"An essential element of hope is the belief and conviction that one's story will be heard. Even if it is a story one does not want to tell." Ted Bowman, American educator and author on grief, loss, and hope
"Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come." Anne Lamott (1954- ), American author, speaker, and teacher
On Priorities and Perspectives
"Follow your bliss." Joseph Campbell
“Work like you don't need the money, love like you've never been hurt, and dance like nobody's watching." Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968)
"There are two ways to live. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
"The only real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes – seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of a hundred others, seeing the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is." Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French novelist, in "The Captive" (1923), Remembrance of Things Past
“Generally speaking, we regard discomfort in any form as bad news. But for practitioners or spiritual warriors–people who have a certain hunger to know what is true–feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we’re holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away. They’re like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we’re stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are.” Pema Chödrön, in When Things Fall Apart
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), British philosopher
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." Bertrand Russell
“People tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they have brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity.” Viktor Frankl, in Man's Search for Meaning
"...and this is the weaving of human living:
of whose fabric each individual is a part:
each is intimately connected with the
bottom and the extremest reach of time:
and not one of these things nor one of these persons
is ever quite to be duplicated nor replaced:
but each is a new and incommunicably tender life,
wounded in every breath, sustaining, for a while,
without defense, the enormous assaults of the universe."
James Agee and Walker Evans, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive." Howard Thurman (1899-1981), African American mystic and activist
"You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'" George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah ( 1921)
