“Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own worth—or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives—they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don’t believe that they deserve any better—so they don’t go looking for it. Or, perhaps, they don’t want the trouble of better. Freud called this a “repetition compulsion.” He thought of it as an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the past—sometimes, perhaps, to formulate those horrors more precisely, sometimes to attempt more active mastery and sometimes, perhaps, because no alternatives beckon. People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results. It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it. It’s partly fate. It’s partly inability. It’s partly … unwillingness to learn? Refusal to learn? Motivated refusal to learn?”
― 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
― 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.”
― 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
― 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“When you have something to say, silence is a lie.”
― 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
― 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“The purpose of life, as far as I can tell… is to find a mode of being that’s so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant.”
― Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief
― Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief
“We require routine and tradition. That’s order. Order can become excessive, and that’s not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown— and that is also not good. We need to stay on the straight and narrow path.”
― 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
― 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
Ewa’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Ewa’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
More friends…
Polls voted on by Ewa
Lists liked by Ewa





















