Louis > Louis's Quotes

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one honest enough to follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself.”
― Ernest Becker

“A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.”
― Rollo May

“There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood.”
― Rollo May

“Our greatest challenge today...is to couple conviction with doubt. By conviction, I mean some pragmatically developed faith, trust, or centeredness; and by doubt I mean openness to the ongoing changeability, mystery, and fallibility of the conviction.”
― Kirk Schneider

“the voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls”
― Nietzsche

“Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own”
― Rollo May

“Therefore, it is we who are responsible for much of the evil in the world; and we are each morally required to accept rather than project that ponderous responsibility-lest we prefer instead to wallow in a perennial state of powerless, frustrated, furious, victimhood. For what one possesses the power to bring about, one has also the power to limit, mitigate, counteract, or transmute.”
― Stephen A. Diamond, Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil and Creativity

“No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.”
― Rollo May, Existence

“When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.”
― Rollo May, Existence

“One must not let oneself be misled: they say 'Judge not!' but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.”
― Rollo May, My Quest for Beauty

“Without awareness, we are not truly alive.”
― James F. T. Bugental

“Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“man is free, in so far as he has the power of contradicting himself and his essential nature. Man is free even from his freedom; that is, he can surrender his humanity”
― Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol 2: Existence and the Christ

“A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.”
― Nietzsche

“Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.”
― Rollo May, My Quest for Beauty

“Integrity is unity of the personality; it implies being brutally honest with ourselves about our intentionality. Since intentionality is inextricably bound up with the daimonic, this is never an easy, nor always pleasant pursuit. But being willing to admit our daimonic tendencies - to know them consciously and to wisely oversee them - brings with it the invaluable blessing of freedom, vigor, inner strength, and self-acceptance.”
― Stephen A. Diamond, Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil and Creativity

“Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.”
― Paul Tillich

“The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“once I gave up the hunt for villains, I had little recourse but to take responsibility for my choices ...Needless to say, this is far less satisfying that nailing villains. It also turned out to be more healing in the end.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor

“But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity