Daniel Brandt

“The shadow, when it is realized, is the source of renewal; the new and productive impulse cannot come from established values of the ego. When there is an impasse, and sterile time in our lives—despite an adequate ego development—we must look to the dark, hitherto unacceptable side which has been at our conscious disposal….This brings us to the fundamental fact that the shadow is the door to our individuality. In so far as the shadow renders us our first view of the unconscious part of our personality, it represents the first stage toward meeting the Self. There is, in fact, no access to the unconscious and to our own reality but through the shadow. Only when we realize that part of ourselves which we have not hitherto seen or preferred not to see can we proceed to question and find the sources from which it feeds and the basis on which it rests. Hence no progress or growth is possible until the shadow is adequately confronted and confronting means more than merely knowing about it. It is not until we have truly been shocked into seeing ourselves as we really are, instead of as we wish or hopefully assume we are, that we can take the first step toward individual reality.”
― Connie Zweig, Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature

“it is through imagination that we can see the reflections of the invisible world,”
― Éliphas Lévi, The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic: A New Translation

“In those early months, Amazon.com hedged its bets by focusing on being both an e-mail store and a Web store. Under the e-mail system, when a customer e-mailed Amazon.com with a request for a particular book, the company would run a search for the book, and e-mail the results back to the customer, who would then send another e-mail to place the order.”
― Robert Spector, Amazon.com: Get Big Fast – An Unauthorized Revealing Account of Jeff Bezos and Internet Brand Dominance

“its 1994–95 version listed 1.5 million titles. Transferring that entire list of titles from the Bowker CD-ROM to the Amazon.com database was a tedious and time-consuming process because only 600 titles could be retrieved at a time. Kaphan compared the process to emptying a swimming pool using a drinking straw. The transfer of Bowker’s weekly update of changes, deletions, and corrections took almost an entire day.”
― Robert Spector, Amazon.com: Get Big Fast – An Unauthorized Revealing Account of Jeff Bezos and Internet Brand Dominance