Richard > Richard's Quotes

“The secret of managing is to keep the folks who hate you away from the ones who haven’t made up their minds yet. ”
― Casey Stengel

“All religions are true but none are literal.”
― Joseph Campbell

“I never do anything I don't want to do. Nor does anyone, but in my case I am always aware of it.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“INTUITION (L. intueri, ‘to look at or into’). I regard intuition as a basic psychological function (q.v.). It is the function that mediates perceptions in an unconscious way. Everything, whether outer or inner objects or their relationships, can be the focus of this perception. The peculiarity of intuition is that it is neither sense perception, nor feeling, nor intellectual inference, although it may also appear in these forms. In intuition a content presents itself whole and complete, without our being able to explain or discover how this content came into existence. Intuition is a kind of instinctive apprehension, no matter of what contents. Like sensation (q.v.), it is an irrational (q.v.) function of perception. As with sensation, its contents have the character of being “given,” in contrast to the “derived” or “produced” character of thinking and feeling (qq.v.) contents. Intuitive knowledge possesses an intrinsic certainty and conviction, which enabled Spinoza (and Bergson) to uphold the scientia intuitiva as the highest form of knowledge. Intuition shares this quality with sensation (q.v.), whose certainty rests on its physical foundation. The certainty of intuition rests equally on a definite state of psychic “alertness” of whose origin the subject is unconscious.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 6: Psychological Types

“When your mind wants to bolt, but your heart hangs on, it is because you don’t know with absolute certainty what the truth is. When you waste so much time on something that you want to believe is true, you begin to overthink things. Eventually, something obvious becomes twisted into something absurd, which keeps us from believing a simpler answer. Over time, you believe your own lies and fantasies to shield yourself from hurt, when following what is logical would have been the quickest way to healing. It is through your own self-imposed delusions that you lose your perspective. The world then becomes different to you when in fact you are different. Why? Because your own ego gets in the way. Everyone wants to feel special. Everyone wants to have faith in others. Everyone wants to believe in fairytales, happy endings and have all bad interactions with others explained. It is easier to sit in denial with your delusions and pray God will intervene, not realizing he has. He gave you commonsense and intuition, but you didn’t like how it made you feel. This is what true mental illness really is: Following your gut instinct through hell because you want to prove you are right, either to yourself or others. You sacrifice choosing to do right, in order to avoid pain. However, you don't realize that you have been in pain for a really long time and believed this was how happiness felt.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“The biggest challenge after success is shutting up about it”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Everybody talks about wanting to change things and help and fix, but ultimately all you can do is fix yourself. And that's a lot. Because if you can fix yourself, it has a ripple effect.”
― Rob Reiner

“I survived because the fire inside me burned brighter than the fire around me.”
― Joshua Graham

“No flattery can heal a bad conscience, so no slander can hurt a good one.”
― Thomas Watson

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.”
― James Baldwin

“Don't let society fool you into believing that if you don't have a girlfriend or boyfriend then you're destined for a life of misery. The Dalai Lama has been single for the last 80 years and he is one of the happiest people on earth. Stop searching for happiness in places outside of yourself, and start finding it where it has always been: within you.”
― Miya Yamanouchi, Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women

“The legalization of marijuana will accelerate the awakening of this world. It will bring its own issues, but it will not create any addictions. Nothing creates addictions; those things just provide vessels for people to explore their pre-existing dependency issues.”
― Story Waters, The Awakening Codes: Co-created with Seth & Future Seth

“she likes a rigged game.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“Never throw the first punch. If you have to throw the second, try to make sure they don't get up for a third.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Steelheart

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin

“She had no mercy. He looked at her neck and thought how he would like to jab it with the knife he had for his muffin. He knew enough anatomy to make pretty certain of getting the carotid artery. And at the same time he wanted to cover her pale, thin face with kisses.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late. It does not improve the temper.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“Narcissistic Parents often enlist other family members on their side, causing rifts and building alliances against a “bad” child. In other words, they may bully their own children. The victims of such behavior often describe themselves as a “scapegoat,” held accountable for all the family troubles. Their mothers often compare them unfavorably to a sibling viewed as “golden,” one child a loser and the other a winner. Narcissistic Parents tell blatant lies, too, painting themselves as victims and their children as heartless ingrates.”
― Joseph Burgo, The Narcissist You Know: Defending Yourself Against Extreme Narcissists in an All-About-Me Age

“Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“To read great books does not mean one becomes ‘bookish’; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance.”
― John Cowper Powys

“Life is short and the number of books is appalling.”
― John Cowper Powys

“This is why it is sometimes hard for introverts to find words: we really hate to compromise, and words are always a compromise.”
― Laurie Helgoe, Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hidden Strength

“Though introverts are drained by interaction, we can take immense pleasure in watching the scene around us.”
― Laurie Helgoe, Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hidden Strength

“Jung thought the psychological forces of healing cannot be known directly — as rational concepts — but only indirectly, as poetic symbols.”
― David Tacey

“WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
― Smedley Butler, War Is a Racket

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Self-acceptance is my refusal to be in an adversarial relationship with myself.”
― Nathaniel Branden