Christopher > Christopher's Quotes

“Like a butcher sharpening knife on knife
I sharpen heart on heart inside me.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“Only when the brain has cleansed itself of its conditioning, greed, envy, ambition, then only it can comprehend that which is complete. Love is this completeness.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti's Notebook

“The early parent-child environment, the balance between being and doing, lives on in the mind. Mindfulness offers an opportunity to see these patterns clearly. In seeing them, in bringing them into the domain of reflective self-awareness, there is a possibility of emerging from their constraints. Choice emerges where before there was only blind and conditioned behavior.”
― Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life

“Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and no power is more absolute than parenthood.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

“As though it had always been forbidden to remember
each of us grew up
knowing nothing about the beginning”
― W.S. Merwin, The Moon Before Morning

“At certain times in history cultures have taken it for granted that a person wasn't fully human unless he or she learned to master thoughts and feelings.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

“People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

“The best predictor of a child's security of attachment is not what happened to his parents as children, but rather how his parents made sense of those childhood experiences.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“You will notice that the most powerful and highly stationed men let drop remarks in which they pray for leisure, praise it, and rate it higher than all their blessings.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“I shall expose and reopen all the wounds which have already healed.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“When children are hurt and in pain psychologically, they don't want to be in distress, so when the situation becomes intolerable, they cease to identify with themselves. When they feel the most threatened, they will choose to identify with the person who is the source of their suffering in an attempt to possess that person's strength.”
― Robert W. Firestone, The Fantasy Bond : Structure of Psychological Defenses

“By developing a contaminated, stigmatized identity, the child victim takes the evil of the abuser into herself and thereby preserves her primary attachments to her parents. Because the inner sense of badness preserves a relationship, it is not readily given up even after the abuse has stopped; rather, it becomes a stable part of the child's personality structure.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“Be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything else...What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, M. D. Herter Norton, Letters To A Young Poet

“To be able to grasp something of value, sometimes you have to perform seemingly inefficient acts. But even activities that appear fruitless don't necessarily end up so. That's the feeling I have, as someone who's felt this, who's experienced it.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“Of course there are teachers who can teach a subject, in a set order, using predetermined phrases, but there aren't many who can adjust their teaching to the abilities and tendencies of their pupils and explain things in their own individual way. Maybe hardly any at all.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“In my youth I believed in somewhere else
I put my faith in travel
now I am becoming my own tree”
― W.S. Merwin, The Moon Before Morning

“I needed my mistakes
in their order
to get me here”
― W.S. Merwin, The Moon Before Morning

“The house was heavy around him, the pressure of the past filling the rooms like odorless gas.”
― E. Annie Proulx (Author), The Shipping News

“One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful even if it is only a floating ash.”
― Norman Maclean, River Runs Through It

“Look, just as time isn't inside clocks
love isn't inside bodies:
bodies only tell the love.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“But peace returns to my heart.
Not peace as it used to be
before it left me years ago. It went away to school,
matured as I did,
and came back looking like me.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.”
― E.B. White

“Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.”
― E.B. White

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“For reasons that are not well understood, war's codes are safer for most of us than love's.”
― David Foster Wallace, Both Flesh and Not

“I knew when I met you an adventure was going to happen.”
― A.A. Milne

“Nothing whets the intelligence more than a passionate suspicion, nothing develops all the faculties of an immature mind more than a trail running away into the dark.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Burning Secret and other stories