Hamêd > Hamêd's Quotes

“It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.”
― Rollo May, Love and Will

“Depression is the inability to construct a future.”
― Rollo May, Love and Will

“When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible.”
― Rollo May, Love and Will

“A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“برای زنده ماندن دو خورشید لازم است؛ یکی در قلب، دیگری در آسمان.”
― نادر ابراهیمی, فردا شکل امروز نیست

“How do we keep our inner fire alive? Two things, at minimum, are needed: an ability to appreciate the positives in our life – and a commitment to action. Every day, it's important to ask and answer these questions: ‘What's good in my life?’ and ‘What needs to be done?”
― Nathaniel Branden

“...بودن به از نبود شدن، خاصه در بهار”
― احمد شاملو, کاشفان فروتن شوکران

“من بعضي از اشعار شعراي ايراني را در ترجمه هاي فرانسوي خوانده ام و بعضي از ابيات فريدالدين عطار نيشاپوري تاثير زيادي در من كرده است. فريدالدين در يكي از اشعار خود مي گويد
خداوندا اگر چه گناهكار هستم و خود را درخور مجازات مي بينم. ليكن از درگاه تو نااميد نيستم براي اينكه مي دانم كه اگر من در اين جهان بر طبق پيروي از طبيعت خود رفتار كرده ام تو در آن جهان نسبت به من بر طبق طبيعت خود رفتار خواهي نمود.
انصاف بدهيد كه آيا از آغاز زندگي بشر تاكنون در جهان چيزي گفته شده است كه از حيث عمق معني بالاتر از اين گفته عطار نيشاپوري باشد و به اين اندازه اميدبخش باشد؟؟؟”
― Maurice Maeterlinck

“In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.”
― Rollo May

“It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.”
― Rollo May

“در همین جهان است که دست کم می توانی امیدوار باشی که روزی کلک خودت را بکنی، امیدی که در آن جهان نمی تواند وجود داشته باشد.”
― صادق هدایت / Sadegh Hedayat

“What is your friend: the things you know, or the things you don't know. First of all, there's a lot more things you don't know. And second, the things you don't know is the birthplace of all your new knowledge! So if you make the things you don't know your friend, rather than the things you know, well then you're always on a quest in a sense. You're always looking for new information in the off chance that somebody who doesn't agree with you will tell you something you couldn't have figured out on your own! It's a completely different way of looking at the world. It's the antithesis of opinionated.”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“Don’t use language instrumentally”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“If you can't understand why someone is doing something, look at the consequences of their actions, whatever they might be, and then infer the motivations from their consequences.

For example if someone is making everyone around them miserable and you'd like to know why, their motive may simply be to make everyone around them miserable including themselves.”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“There's a class of things to be afraid of: it's "those things that you should be afraid of". Those are the things that go bump in the night, right? You're always exposed to them when you go to horror movies, especially if they're not the gore type of horror movie. They're always hinting at something that's going on outside of your perceptual sphere, and they frighten you because you don't know what's out there. For that the Blair Witch Project was a really good example, because nothing ever happens in that movie but it's frightenting and not gory. It plays on the fact tht you do have a category of Those Things Of Which You Should Be Afraid. So it's a category, frightening things. And only things capable of abstraction can come up with something like the caregory of frightenting things.

And so Kali is like an embodied representation of the category of frightening things. And then you might ask yourself, well once you come up with the concept of the category of frightening things, maybe you can come up with the concept of what to do in the face of frightening things. Which is not the same as "what do you do when you encounter a lion", or "what do you do when you encounter someone angry". It's a meta question, right?

But then you could say, at a philosophical level: "You will encounter elements of the category of all those things which can frighten and undermine you during your life. Is there something that you can do *as a category* that would help you deal with that." And the answer is yeah, there is in fact. And that's what a lot of religious stories and symbolic stories are trying to propose to you, is the solution to that. One is, approach it voluntarily. Carefully, but voluntarily. Don't freeze and run away. Explore, instead. You expose yourself to risk but you gain knowledge.

And you wouldn't have a cortex which, you know, is ridiculously disproportionate, if as a species we hadn't decided that exploration trumps escape or freezing. We explore. That can make you the master of a situation, so you can be the master of something like fire without being terrified of it.

One of the things that the Hindus do in relationship to Kali, is offer sacrifices. So you can say, well why would you offer sacrifices to something you're afraid of. And it's because that is what you do, that's always what you do. You offer up sacrifices to the unknown in the hope that good things will happen to you.

One example is that you're worried about your future. Maybe you're worried about your job, or who you're going to marry, or your family, there's a whole category of things to be worried about, so you're worried about your future. SO what're you doing in university? And the answer is you're sacrificing your free time in the present, to the cosmos so to speak, in the hope that if you offer up that sacrifice properly, the future will smile upon you. And that's one of the fundamental discoveries of the human race. And it's a big deal, that discovery: by changing what you cling to in the present, you can alter the future.”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“،زندگی حتی وقتی انکارش می‌کنی
،حتی وقتی نادیده‌اش می‌گیری
حتی وقتی نمی‌خواهی‌اش
.از تو قوی‌تر است
.از هر چیز دیگری قوی‌تر است

آدم‌هایی که از بازداشتگاه‌های کار اجباری برگشتند
.دوباره زاد و ولد کردند
،مردان و زنانی که شکنجه دیده بودند
که مرگ نزدیکانشان و سوخته شدن خانه‌هایشان را
،دیده بودند
،دوباره دنبال اتوبوس‌ها دویدند
به پیش بینی‌های هوا‌شناسی با دقت گوش کردند
.و دختر‌هایشان را شوهر دادند
.باور کردنی نیست اما همین گونه است
.زندگی از هر چیز دیگری قوی‌تر است”
― Anna Gavalda, Someone I Loved

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.”
― Paul Tillich

“Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.”
― Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now

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

“The first duty of love is to listen.”
― Paul Tillich

“The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable.”
― paul tillich

“Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.”
― Paul Tillich

“Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament.”
― Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now

“Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being”
― Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be

“I have given no definition of love. This is impossible, because there is no higher principle by which it could be defined. It is life itself in its actual unity. The forms and structures in which love embodies itself are the forms and structures in which love overcomes its self-destructive forces.”
― Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era

“[A] process was going on in which people were transformed into things, into pieces of reality which pure science can calculate and technical science can control. … [T]he safety which is guaranteed by well-functioning mechanisms for the technical control of nature, by the refined psychological control of the person, by the rapidly increasing organizational control of society – this safety is bought at a high price: man, for whom all this was invented as a means, becomes a means himself in the service of means.”
― Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be