Juan Cortez

“People don't have ideas. Ideas have people.”
― Carl Jung

“In order to change conditions outside ourselves, whether they concern the environment or relations with others, we must first change within ourselves.”
― Mark Epstein, Thoughts Without A Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective

“When we stop distancing ourselves from the pain in the world, our own or others, we create the possibility of a new experience, one that often surprises because of how much joy, connection, or relief it yields. Destruction may continue, but humanity shines through.”
― Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life

“A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is "dense", sensing to what a degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millenia.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays