Valeria > Valeria's Quotes

“Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”
― Donald Woods Winnicott

“It is true that many creative people fail to make mature personal relationships, and some are extremely isolated. It is also true that, in some instances, trauma, in the shape of early separation or bereavement, has steered the potentially creative person toward developing aspects of his personality which can find fulfillment in comparative isolation. But this does not mean that solitary, creative pursuits are themselves pathological....
[A]voidance behavior is a response designed to protect the infant from behavioural disorganization. If we transfer this concept to adult life, we can see that an avoidant infant might very well develop into a person whose principal need was to find some kind of meaning and order in life which was not entirely, or even chiefly, dependent upon interpersonal relationships.”
― Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self

“Some split between the inner world and outer world is common to all behaviour, and the need to bridge the gap is the source of creative behaviour.”
― Anthony Storr

“One man's faith is another man's delusion”
― Anthony Storr

“It is widely believed that interpersonal relationships of an intimate kind are the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness. Yet the lives of creative individuals often seem to run counter to this assumption.”
― Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self

“The human spirit is not indestructible; but a courageous few discover that, when in hell, they are granted a glimpse of heaven.”
― Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self

“In a culture in which interpersonal relationships are generally considered to provide the answer to every form of distress, it is sometimes difficult to persuade well-meaning helpers that solitude can be as therapeutic as emotional support.”
― Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“There's no coming to consciousness without pain.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole.”
― C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

“What you resist, persists”
― C.G. Jung

“Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.”
― Carl Jung

“There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“[The figure of the Trickster] is the collective shadow.”
― C.G. Jung

“Nationalismi ja heimoajattelu ovat sitkeitä tauteja. Niistä pääsee lukemalla ja matkustamalla”
― Kjell Westö

“History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography—in particular, to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“Isn't language loss a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world's people? Perhaps, but it's a bad thing in other respects. Languages differ in structure and vocabulary, in how they express causation and feelings and personal responsibility, hence in how they shape our thoughts. There's no single purpose "best" language; instead, different languages are better suited for different purposes. For instance, it may not have been an accident that Plato and Aristotle wrote in Greek, while Kant wrote in German. The grammatical particles of those two languages, plus their ease in forming compound words, may have helped make them the preeminent languages of western philosophy. Another example, familiar to all of us who studied Latin, is that highly inflected languages (ones in which word endings suffice to indicate sentence structure) can use variations of word order to convey nuances impossible with English. Our English word order is severely constrained by having to serve as the main clue to sentence structure. If English becomes a world language, that won't be because English was necessarily the best language for diplomacy.”
― Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal

“With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
― Mark Twain