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124 books
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72 voters
“Unwilling to tolerate life’s ambiguity, its unresolvability, its inevitability, we search for certainty, demanding that someone else must provide it. Stubbornly, relentlessly, we seek the wise man, the wizard, the good parent, someone else who will show us the way. Surely someone must know. It simply cannot be that life is just what it appears to be, that there are no hidden meanings, that this is it, just this and nothing more. It’s not fair, not enough! We cannot possibly bear having to live life as it is, without reassurance, without being special, without even being offered some comforting explanations. Come on now! Come across! You’ve got to give us something to make it all right. The medicine tastes lousy. Why should we have to swallow it just because it’s the only thing we can do? Can’t you at least promise us that we will have to take it just once, that it won’t taste that bad, that we will feel just fine immediately afterward, that we will be glad we took it? No? Well then, surely, at least you have to give us a lollipop for being good. But what if we are talking to ourselves? What if there is no one out there listening? What if for each of us the only wise man, the only wizard, the only good parent we will ever have is our own helpless, vulnerable self? What then?”
― If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him: The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients
― If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him: The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients
“Crises marked by anxiety, doubt, and despair have always been those periods of personal unrest that occur at the times when a man is sufficiently unsettled to have an opportunity for personal growth. We must always see our own feelings of uneasiness as being our chance for "making the growth choice rather than the fear choice.”
― If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients
― If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients
“Our lawns manifest our cultural desire: they are static, they are artificial, and they are kept sexually immature.”
― A Language Older Than Words
― A Language Older Than Words
“There is the image of the man who imagines himself to be a prisoner in a cell. He stands at one end of this small, dark, barren room, on his toes, with arms stretched upward, hands grasping for support onto a small, barred window, the room's only apparent source of light. If he holds on tight, straining toward the window, turning his head just so, he can see a bit of bright sunlight barely visible between the uppermost bars. This light is his only hope. He will not risk losing it. And so he continues to staring toward that bit of light, holding tightly to the bars. So committed is his effort not to lose sight of that glimmer of life-giving light, that it never occurs to him to let go and explore the darkness of the rest of the cell. So it is that he never discovers that the door at the other end of the cell is open, that he is free. He has always been free to walk out into the brightness of the day, if only he would let go. (192)”
― If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients
― If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients
Jess’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Jess’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
677 books
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165 friends
841 books
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74 friends
14 books
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273 friends
38 books
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72 friends
3 books
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81 friends
100 books
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95 friends
1 book
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162 friends
138 books
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101 friends
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