Christian McDonald > Christian McDonald's Quotes

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#1

“I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for long.

If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who did have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be forgiven? I myself certainly hope that it will not. The Jews have seen through Jesus and Mohammed. In retrospect, many of them have also seen through the mythical, primitive, and cruel figures of Abraham and Moses. Nearer to our own time, in the bitter combats over the work of Marx and Freud and Einstein, Jewish participants and protagonists have not been the least noticeable. May this always be the case, whenever any human primate sets up, or is set up by others, as a Messiah.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

tags: abraham, antisemitism, atheism, christianity, christians, einstein, freud, humans, islam, jesus, jews, marx, messiah, moses, muhammad, muslims, myth, prophets, religion, theism

57 likes

#2

“It's effortless to let go of self-absorbed people. It's challenging to let go of someone you care about and it's exceedingly difficult to let go of an ideal and a belief in someone because what exacerbates the disappointment of finding out they weren't who they presented themselves to be, is the betrayal of it.”
― Donna Lynn Hope

tags: betrayal, letting-go

246 likes

#3

“...repeated trauma in childhood forms and deforms the personality. The child trapped in an abusive environment is faced with formidable tasks of adaptation. She must find a way to preserve a sense of trust in people who are untrustworthy, safety in a situation that is unsafe, control in a situation that is terrifyingly unpredictable, power in a situation of helplessness. Unable to care for or protect herself, she must compensate for the failures of adult care and protection with the only means at her disposal, an immature system of psychological defenses.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

tags: abuse-survivors, abused-child, abusive-parents, betrayal, betrayal-trauma, child-abuse, complex-ptsd, coping, defense-mechanism, helpelessness, out-of-control, overwhelmed, overwhelming, parental-abuse, personality, personality-disorders, post-traumatic-stress-disorder, posttraumatic-stress-disorder, powerlessness, psychological-defence, ptsd, terrifying, trauma, traumatic-experiences, traumatized, trust, unsafe, untrustworthy

146 likes

#4

“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

tags: abuse, attachment, betrayal, betrayal-trauma, child-abuse, complex-ptsd, identity, incest, parental-abuse, personality, personality-disorder, self-stigma, stigmatization, victims

66 likes

#5

“Keep dating and you will become so sick, so badly crippled, so deformed, so emotionally warped and mentally defective that you will marry anybody.”
― Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady: A Memoir

70 likes

#6

“It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

tags: happiness, pain, peace, scar, sweetness

15749 likes

#7

“People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.”
― Jim Morrison

tags: jim, life, morrison, pain, reality

6440 likes

#8

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

tags: addiction, alchohol, drinking, drugs, loneliness, melancholy, pain

3748 likes

#9

“I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

tags: happiness, loneliness, melancholy, philosophy, psychology

2657 likes

#10

“Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.”
― Italo Calvino

tags: melancholy

1744 likes

#11

“Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

tags: melancholy, night, sad, winter

992 likes

#12

“Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.”
― Remy de Gourmont

tags: autumn, fall, melancholy

141 likes

#13

“A light which lives on what the flames devour,
a grey landscape surrounding me with scorch,
a crucifixion by a single wound,
a sky and earth that darken by each hour,
a sob of blood whose red ribbon adorns
a lyre without a pulse, and oils the torch,
a tide which stuns and strands me on the reef,
a scorpion scrambling, stinging in my chest--
this is the wreath of love, this bed of thorns
is where I dream of you stealing my rest,
haunting these sunken ribs cargoed with grief.
I sought the peak of prudence, but I found
the hemlock-brimming valley of your heart,
and my own thirst for bitter truth and art.

- Stigmata of Love”
― Federico Garcia Lorca

131 likes

#14

“Name me no names for my disease,
With uninforming breath;
I tell you I am none of these,
But homesick unto death —Homesick for hills that I had known,
For brooks that I had crossed,
...Before I met this flesh and bone
And followed and was lost… .And though they break my heart at last,
Yet name no name of ills.
Say only, "Here is where he passed,
Seeking again those hills.”
― Witter Bynner, Grenstone Poems: A Sequence

tags: longing, melancholy, regret, yearning

68 likes

#15

“Unfortunately I am a completely impractical person, caught up in endless trains of thought. All of us are fantasists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself. It seems to me sometimes that we never get used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder.”
― W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

tags: connections, jazz-writing, melancholy

69 likes

#16

“Highly sensitive people are too often perceived as weaklings or damaged goods. To feel intensely is not a symptom of weakness, it is the trademark of the truly alive and compassionate. It is not the empath who is broken, it is society that has become dysfunctional and emotionally disabled. There is no shame in expressing your authentic feelings. Those who are at times described as being a 'hot mess' or having 'too many issues' are the very fabric of what keeps the dream alive for a more caring, humane world. Never be ashamed to let your tears shine a light in this world.”
― Anthon St. Maarten

tags: authenticity, caring, caring-for-others, caring-too-much, compassion, damaged-goods, damaged-people, damaged-souls, dysfunctional-society, dysfunctional-world, emotional, emotional-intelligence, emotional-pain, emotionally-disabled, empath, empathic, empaths, empathy, empathy-diversity, feeling, feelings, highly-sensitive-person, hot-mess, humane, humaneness, new-age-quotes, new-world, sensitive, sensitiveness, sensitivity, society, society-humanity, society-problem, tears-crying, weakness, weakness-and-strength, weakness-quotes

1071 likes

#17

“You are not limited to this body, to this mind, or to this reality—you are a limitless ocean of Consciousness, imbued with infinite potential. You are existence itself.”
― Joseph P. Kauffman, The Answer Is YOU: A Guide to Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Freedom

tags: acceptance, appreciation, awakening, awareness, awe, bliss, brahman, buddhism, compassion, connection, consciousness, emotional, emptiness, enjoy, enlightenment, evolution, existence, fear, forgiveness, form, formless, freedom, god, gratitude, happiness, heart, hinduism, holographic-universe, illusion, interconnection, journey, joy, life, love, maya, mental, mind, mystery, nature, nirvana, non-resistence, nonduality, now, oneness, path, peace, presence, reality, samadhi, self, self-acceptence, self-love, source, spirit, spiritual, spirituality, tantra, third-eye, truth, unity, universe, wisdom, within, zen

65 likes

#18

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”
― Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

tags: adversity, beauty, empathy, people, understanding

5230 likes

#19

“Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.”
― Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflictions: The Agony of Being Connected to Everything in the Universe

tags: compassion, destiny, empathy, pain, universe

1300 likes

#20

“To perceive is to suffer.”
― Aristotle

tags: empathy, life, suffer, understanding

1301 likes

#21

“We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

tags: compassion, empathy, kindness, suffering, understanding-others

1162 likes

#22

“There are so many men, all endlessly attempting to sweep me off my feet. And there is one of you, trying just the opposite. Making sure my feet are firm beneath me, lest I fall.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

tags: empathy, freedom, friendship, love, men, respect, women

476 likes

#23

“The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

tags: empathy, humility, love, narcissism, narcissistic, objective, objectivity, psychology, selfishness, subjective, understanding, understanding-oneself-and-others

459 likes

#24

“Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

tags: friendship

54 likes

#25

“Maybe I was destined to forever fall in love with people I couldn’t have. Maybe there’s a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them. Waiting to make me feel the same impossibility over and over again.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

tags: impossible, love, love-hurts, unrequited-love

1283 likes

#26

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

tags: writing

7916 likes

#27

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”
― sylvia plath

tags: goals

5316 likes

#28

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

5082 likes

#29

“And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

tags: confidences, secrets, sharing-secrets

3926 likes