S > S's Quotes

“There is no greater wonder than to range The starry heights, to leave the earth’s dull regions, To ride the clouds, to stand on Atlas’ shoulders, And see, far off, far down, the little figures Wandering here and there, devoid of reason, Anxious, in fear of death, and so advise them, And so make fate an open book… …Full sail, I voyage Over the boundless ocean, and I tell you Nothing is permanent in all the world. All things are fluid; every image forms, Wandering through change. Time is itself a river In constant movement, and the hours flow by Like water, wave on wave, pursued, pursuing, Forever fugitive, forever new. That which has been, is not; that which was not, Begins to be; motion and moment always In process of renewal… Not even the so-called elements are constant… Nothing remains the same: the great renewer, Nature, makes form from form, and, oh, believe me That nothing ever dies….”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“although it is true that what it is we are attending to determines the type of attention we pay to it, it is also importantly true that the type of attention we pay determines what it is we see.”
― Iain McGilchrist, Ways of Attending: How our Divided Brain Constructs the World

“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

“Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make the uncommon common.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

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

“So the left hemisphere needs certainty and needs to be right. The right hemisphere makes it possible to hold several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without premature closure on one outcome.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“The only certainty, it seems to me, is that those who believe they are certainly right are certainly wrong.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“According to Max Planck, ‘Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.’ And he continued: ‘Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“Metaphor is the crucial aspect of language whereby it retains its connectedness to the world, and”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“If language was given to men to conceal their thoughts, then gesture's purpose was to disclose them.’377”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“Language enables the left hemisphere to represent the world ‘off-line’, a conceptual version, distinct from the world of experience, and shielded from the immediate environment, with its insistent impressions, feelings and demands, abstracted from the body, no longer dealing with what is concrete, specific, individual, unrepeatable, and constantly changing, but with a disembodied representation of the world, abstracted, central, not particularised in time and place, generally applicable, clear and fixed. Isolating things artificially from their context brings the advantage of enabling us to focus intently on a particular aspect of reality and how it can be modelled, so that it can be grasped and controlled. But its losses are in the picture as a whole. Whatever lies in the realm of the implicit, or depends on flexibility, whatever can't be brought into focus and fixed, ceases to exist as far as the speaking hemisphere is concerned.”
― 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

“I put my heart and soul into my work, and I have lost my mind in the process.”
― Vincent Willem van Gogh

“I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.”
― Gabor Maté

“When I am sharply judgmental of any other person, it's because I sense or see reflected in them some aspect of myself that I don't want to acknowledge.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“The difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“Not why the addiction but why the pain.”
― Gabor Maté

“Passion creates, addiction consumes.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“Being cut off from our own natural self-compassion is one of the greatest impairments we can suffer. Along with our ability to feel our own pain go our best hopes for healing, dignity and love. What seems nonadapative and self-harming in the present was, at some point in our lives, an adaptation to help us endure what we then had to go through. If people are addicted to self-soothing behaviours, it's only because in their formative years they did not receive the soothing they needed. Such understanding helps delete toxic self-judgment on the past and supports responsibility for the now. Hence the need for compassionate self-inquiry.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“Not the world, not what’s outside of us, but what we hold inside traps us. We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“Strong convictions do not necessarily signal a powerful sense of self: very often quite the opposite. Intensely held beliefs may be no more than a person’s unconscious effort to build a sense of self to fill what, underneath, is experienced as a vacuum.”
― Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress

“Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Shame is the deepest of the “negative emotions,” a feeling we will do almost anything to avoid. Unfortunately, our abiding fear of shame impairs our ability to see reality.”
― Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid—and I know they are—yet I won't be wiser?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to the animals, for they are without sin, while you, with all your greatness, you defile the earth wherever you appear and leave an ignoble trail behind you -- and that is true, alas, for almost every one of us!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov