Seema > Seema's Quotes

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
― Joseph Campbell

“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“A man can only rise, conquer, and achieve by lifting up his thoughts.”
― James Allen

“Let a man radically alter his thoughts, and he will be astonished at the rapid transformation it will effect in the material conditions of his life.”
― James Allen, As a Man Thinketh

“Meaning emerges from engagement with the world, not from abstract contemplation of it.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

“The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“Thinking is always thinking, but philosophical thinking is, upon the whole, at the extreme end of the scale of distance from the active urgency of concrete situations. It is because of this fact that neglect of context is the besetting fallacy of philosophical thought … I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context … neglect of context is the greatest single disaster which philosophic thinking can incur.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“Hölderlin’s lines: Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch (‘Where there is danger, that which will save us also grows’).”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“we might have to revise the superior assumption that we understand the world better than our ancestors, and adopt a more realistic view that we just see it differently – and may indeed be seeing less than they did.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“There is a tremendous irony in happiness. It comes from a root word meaning ‘by chance’ or ‘an occurrence’, which in a positive sense connotes a sense of newness, wonder, and appreciation of chance occurrences. The irony is that people not only seek it, they try to hold on to it—especially to avoid any sense of ‘unhappiness’. Unfortunately, these very control efforts can become heavy, planned, closed, rigid and fixed.”
― Steven C. Hayes

“Suppressing Your Thoughts Suppose you have a thought you don’t like. You’ll apply your verbal problem-solving strategies to it. For example, when the thought comes up, you may try to stop thinking it. There is extensive literature on what is likely to happen as a result. Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner (1994) has shown that the frequency of the thought that you try not to think may go down for a short while, but it soon appears more often than ever. The thought becomes even more central to your thinking, and it is even more likely to evoke a response. Thought suppression only makes the situation worse.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

“Psychological flexibility is the ability to feel and think with openness, to attend voluntarily to your experience of the present moment, and to move your life in directions that are important to you, building habits that allow you to live life in accordance with your values and aspirations. It’s about learning not to turn away from what is painful, instead turning toward your suffering in order to live a life full of meaning and purpose.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“Consumers of psychological change advice should demand broadly useful methods of change that work, and that do so through change processes that have precision, scope, and depth.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“Vision without action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Does the client experience life as merely imposed or rather as something he or she can author in a meaningful and ongoing way?”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Gedachten zijn als lenzen waardoor we naar onze wereld kijken.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

“Another key process in the cycle of suffering is experiential avoidance. It is an immediate consequence of fusing with mental instructions that encourage the suppression, control, or elimination of experiences expected to be distressing.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Deictic framing can be successfully taught, however, and when it is, perspective-taking and theory-of-mind skills improve”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Once there is a verbally stated goal, however, we can assess the degree to which analytic practices help us achieve it. This option allows successful working toward a goal to function as a useful guide for science.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Het is niet eenvoudig contact te krijgen met het leven dat je wenst en te leren hoe je je dromen in het heden kunt verwezenlijken, omdat het menselijke verstand de ene na de andere val laat dichtklappen en de ene na de andere hindernis opwerpt”
― Steven C. Hayes, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life, Volume 2 of 2

“Rather than perceiving the former as “bad” and the latter as “good,” we should recognize both as feedback.”
― Damon Zahariades, The Mental Toughness Handbook: A Step-By-Step Guide to Facing Life's Challenges, Managing Negative Emotions, and Overcoming Adversity with Courage and Poise

“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
― Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

“You're only given a spark of madness. You musn't lose it.”
― Robin Williams

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“If you can't fight and you can't flee, flow.”
― Robert Elias M.D.

“99.9 PER CENT OF THE PHOTONS IN THE UNIVERSE DO NOT COME FROM STARS OR GALAXIES BUT ARE THE LEFTOVER HEAT OF THE BIG BANG”
― Marcus Chown, Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand: Fifty Wonders That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe

“Incredibly, the human brain does all of its mega-computing on roughly 20 watts of power, which is the equivalent of a very dim light bulb. By comparison, a supercomputer capable of a similar rate of computation requires 200,000 watts – in other words, it is 10,000 times less energy-efficient than the human brain. Despite the human brain’s efficiency, however, it is extraordinarily energy hungry compared with all other tissues. While accounting for only 2 to 3 per cent of the mass of an adult, it consumes about 20 per cent of the body’s oxygen.”
― Marcus Chown, Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand: Fifty Wonders That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe

“When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute—it’s longer than an hour. That’s relativity! Albert Einstein”
― Marcus Chown, Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You

“If you keep your destiny in mind, every moment in life becomes an opportunity for moving closer to it.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha