reading > reading's Quotes

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”
― Lao Tzu

“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”
― Nikola Tesla

“Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.”
― Nikola Tesla, My Inventions

“Perseverance is a virtue of the less brilliant.”
― Santiago Ramón y Cajal

“Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.”
― R.D. Laing

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
― William Shakespear, Hamlet

“Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely.”
― Jean Piaget

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

“Tell me what you fear and I will tell you what has happened to you.”
― Donald Woods Winnicott

“Our dreams and stories may contain implicit aspects of our lives even without our awareness. In fact, storytelling may be a primary way in which we can linguistically communicate to others—as well as to ourselves—the sometimes hidden contents of our implicitly remembering minds. Stories make available perspectives on the emotional themes of our implicit memory that may otherwise be consciously unavailable to us. This may be one reason why journal writing and intimate communication with others, which are so often narrative processes, have such powerful organizing effects on the mind: They allow us to modulate our emotions and make sense of the world.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are

“for to have a deep attachment for a person (or a place or thing) is to have taken them as the terminating object of our instinctual responses."
Separation anxiety. International Journal of Psycho-Analysts, XLI, 1-25 (1959(”
― John Bowlby

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
― Mark Twain

“The renowned seventh-century Zen master Seng-tsan taught that true freedom is being "without anxiety about imperfection.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.”
― William James

“The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.”
― William James

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”
― William James

“Now I want to say: 'After being - doing and being done to. But first, being.”
― D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality

“Adolescents need freedom to choose, but not so much freedom that they cannot, in fact, make a choice.”
― Erik H. Erikson

“You see a child play, and it is so close to seeing an artist paint, for in play a child says things without uttering a word. You can see how he solves his problems. You can also see what's wrong. Young children, especially, have enormous creativity, and whatever's in them rises to the surface in free play.”
― Erik H. Erikson

“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such

“In health, then, children develop enough belief in themselves and in
other people to hate external controls of all kinds, controls have changed
over into self-control. In self-control the conflict has been worked
through within the person in advance. So I see it this way: good condi-
tions in the early stages lead to a sense of security, and a sense of security
leads on to seIf-control, and when selfcontrol is a fact, then security that
is imposed is an insult (36).”
― D.W. Winnicott

“In essence, the idea is to let your body fall asleep while you keep your mind awake.”
― Stephen LaBerge, Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life

“As much as we thirst for approval, we dread condemnation.”
― Hans Selye

“The element of chance in basic research is overrated. Chance is a lady who smiles only upon those few who know how to make her smile.”
― Hans Selye

“To make a great dream come true, you must first have a great dream.”
― Hans Selye

“It's what we think we know that keeps us from learning.”
― Claude Bernard

“1)A fact in itself is nothing. It is valuable only for the idea attached to it, or for the proof which it furnishes.

2)Observation is a passive science, experimentation an active science.

3)Put off your imagination, as you put off your overcoat, when you enter the laboratory. Put it on again, as you put on your overcoat, when you leave.

4)The investigator should have a robust faith - and yet not believe.

5)Mediocre men often have the most acquired knowledge.

6)Science does not permit exceptions.”
― Claude Bernard

“Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a fear of it. Desire takes one out of oneself, into the possibility or relationship, but it also takes one deeper into oneself. Anxiety turns one back on oneself, but only onto the self that is already known.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”
― Karl Raimund Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies

“In my view, if you don’t understand how repression operates, real growth is nearly impossible since you’re unlikely to come into contact with that pain you’re warding off. Even if you’re able to overcome some kind of maladaptive behavior or thought pattern, you’re likely to develop another equally maladaptive strategy to keep the repressed at bay. Freud always insisted that unconscious material is “indestructible.” Just because you’re not consciously aware of how much anger you feel toward your father, that doesn’t mean the anger has disappeared. It will inevitably continue to make its presence known in covert ways – humorous little digs, for instance, or sarcasm.”
― Joseph Burgo, Why Do I Do That?