Jakob > Jakob's Quotes

“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”
― Carl Jung

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“If you know the way broadly you will see it in everything.”
― Miyamoto Musashi

“Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance”
― Albert Maysles

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi

“Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Every kind of contempt for sex, every impurification of it by means of the concept "impure", is the crime par excellence against life--is the real sin against the holy spirit of life”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi

“Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”
― Alan Watts

“And then came the insight that irrevocably transformed my sense of how good human life could be. I was feeling boundless love for one of my best friends, and I suddenly realized that if a stranger had walked through the door at that moment, he or she would have been fully included in this love. Love was at bottom impersonal—and deeper than any personal history could justify. Indeed, a transactional form of love—I love you because. . . —now made no sense at all.”
― Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

“If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.”
― Alfred Korzybski

“Freely we serve
Because we freely love, as in our will
To love or not; in this we stand or fall.”
― John Milton

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“The precepts “Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you” ... are born from the Gospel’s profound spirit of individualism, which refuses to let one’s own actions and conduct depend in any way on somebody else’s acts. The Christian refuses to let his acts be mere reactions—such conduct would lower him to the level of his enemy. The act is to grow organically from the person, “as the fruit from the tree.” ... What the Gospel demands is not a reaction which is the reverse of the natural reaction, as if it said: “Because he strikes you on the cheek, tend the other”—but a rejection of all reactive activity, of any participation in common and average ways of acting and standards of judgment.”
― Max Scheler, Ressentiment

“This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”
― Alan Watts

“On the information sheet in a New York hotel, I recently read: 'Dear guest! To guarantee that you will fully enjoy your stay with us, this hotel is totally smoke-free. For any infringement of this regulation, you will be charged $200.' The beauty of this formulation, taken literally, is that you are to be punished for refusing to fully enjoy your stay.”
― Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

“as soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology

“Yeah, because I'm extremely romantic here. You know what is my fear? This postmodern, permissive, pragmatic etiquette towards sex. It's horrible. They claim sex is healthy; it's good for the heart, for blood circulation, it relaxes you. They even go into how kissing is also good because it develops the muscles here – this is horrible, my God! It's no longer that absolute passion. I like this idea of sex as part of love, you know: 'I'm ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever.' There is something nice, transcendent, about it. I remain incurably romantic.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself.”
― Friedrich Hegel

“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, "Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner." I don't try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.”
― Carl R. Rogers, A Way of Being

“I have no doubt that your acceptance of Christ coincided with some very positive changes in your life. Perhaps you now love other people in a way that you never imagined possible. You may even experience feelings of bliss while praying. I don’t wish to denigrate any of these experiences. I would point out, however, that billions of other human beings, in every time and place, have had similar experiences - but they had them while thinking about Krishna, or Allah, or the Buddha, while making art or music, or while contemplating the beauty of Nature. There is no question that it is possible for people to have profoundly transformative experiences. And there is no question that it is possible for them to misinterpret these experiences, and to further delude themselves about the nature of reality. You are, of course, right to believe that there is more to life than simply understanding the structure and contents of the universe. But this does not make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about its structure and contents any more respectable.”
― Sam Harris

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“This is not the time to reawaken old oppositions, but rather to seek what lies above and beyond all opposition.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free.”
― Rumi

“Never give a sword to a man who can't dance.”
― Confucius, The Analects