Vincent Keane > Vincent's Quotes

“People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients. They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with somebody who is not worth so much attention, and so on. There is a kind of floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated dynamism to the wrong situation.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales

“Any change, even a change for the better is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.”
― Arnold Bennett

“The real Tragedy is the tragedy of the man who never in his life braces himself for his one supreme effort-he never stretches to his full capacity, never stands up to his full stature.”
― Arnold Bennett

“Which of us is not saying to himself--which of us has not been saying to himself all his life: "I shall alter that when I have a little more time"? We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.”
― Arnold Bennett

“No tree can grow to Heaven,” adds the ever-terrifying Carl Gustav Jung, psychoanalyst extraordinaire, “unless its roots reach down to Hell.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“The purpose of life, as far as I can tell… is to find a mode of being that’s so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

“It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.”
― Robert Bly, My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy: Poems – Intimate Ghazals of Startling Beauty, Wildness, and Astounding Energy

“It is not our job to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves
Like the trees, and be born again,
Drawing up from the great roots.”
― Robert Bly

“The candle is not lit
To give light, but to testify to the night.”
― Robert Bly, The Night Abraham Called to the Stars: Poems

“I know men who are healthier at fifty than they've ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone.”
― Robert Bly

“A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.”
― Robert Bly, Morning Poems: A Sensational Daily Poetry Collection on Waking, Mourning, and the Mystery of Creation

“If any help was going to arrive to lift me out of my misery, it would come from the dark side of my personality.”
― Robert Bly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow: A Poetic Journey into the Dark Side of the Human Personality, Shadow Work, and the Importance of Confronting Our Hidden Self

“Learning to live with ambiguity is learning to live with how life really is, full of complexities and strange surprises..:”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“Death is only one way of dying; living partially, living fearfully, is our more common, daily collusion with death.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“Doubt is unsettling to the ego, and those who are drawn to ideologies that promise the dispelling of doubt by proffering certainties will never grow. In seeking certainty they are courting the death of the soul, whose nature is forever churning possibility, forever seeking the larger, forever riding the melting edge of certainty’s glacier.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“That of which we are not aware, owns us.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“The one thing parents can do for their children is live their lives as fully as they can, for this will open the children’s imagination, grant permission to them to have their own journey, and open the doors of possibility for them. Wherever we are stuck, they will have a tendency to be stuck also or will spend their life trying to overcompensate. Living our own journey as fully as possible is not only a gift to our soul, it also frees up the generation behind us to live theirs as well. The very freedom to live our lives that we wished from our parents, we thereby grant to our children to live theirs.”
― James Hollis, Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey

“Thus we are forced into a difficult choice: anxiety or depression. If we move forward, as our soul insists, we may be flooded with anxiety. If we do not move forward, we will suffer the depression, the pressing down of the soul’s purpose. In such a difficult choice one must choose anxiety, for anxiety is at least the path of personal growth; depression is a stagnation and defeat of life.”
― James Hollis, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places

“Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither.” William Wordsworth,”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Walnut Trees of Altenburg: The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.2”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“There are people who prefer to say 'yes' and there are people who prefer to say 'no'. Those who say 'yes' are rewarded by the adventures they have. Those who say 'no' are rewarded by the safety they attain.”
― Keith Johnstone

“As I grew up, everything started getting grey and dull. I could still remember the amazing intensity of the world I'd lived in as a child, but I thought the dulling of perception was an inevitable consequence of age - just as a lens of the eye is bound gradually to dim. I didn't understand that clarity is in the mind.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“There are people who prefer to say ‘Yes’, and there are people who prefer to say ‘No’. Those who say ‘Yes’ are rewarded by the adventures they have, and those who say ‘No’ are rewarded by the safety they attain. There are far more ‘No’ sayers around then ‘Yes’ sayers, but you can train one type to behave like the other. There is a link with status transactions here, since low-status players tend to accept, and high-status players to block.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“To die will be an awfully big adventure.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan