John Olsson

“Sometimes a hypocrite is nothing more than a man in the process of changing.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer

“Learning without thinking is useless. Thinking without learning is dangerous.”
― Confucius, The Analects

“You see, all our ordinary views of things are no good, they do not lead anywhere. It is necessary to think differently, and this means to see things we do not see now, and not to see things we see now. And this last is perhaps the most difficult, because we are accustomed to see certain things: it is a great sacrifice not to see the things we are accustomed to see. We are accustomed to think that we live in a more or less comfortable world. Certainly there are unpleasant things, such as wars and revolutions, but on the whole it is a comfortable and well-meaning world. It is most difficult to get rid of this idea of a well-meaning world. And then we must understand that we do not see things themselves at all. We see like in Plato’s allegory of the cave only the reflections of things, so that what we see has lost all reality. We must realize how often we are governed and controlled not by the things themselves but by our ideas of things, our views of things, our picture of things. This is the most interesting thing. Try to think about it.”
― P.D. Ouspensky, The Fourth Way

“I want to be better than my pain, but I cannot will my way through it. I have willed my way through so much pain in my life, and now I have come up against pain that is bigger than my will.”
― Sonya Huber, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System