It is a lonely and crazy existence. The human condition plagues us all, and that’s OK because it has always done so and always will. Writers, artist, poets, scientists, and psychologists across time and cultures have been trying to figure it out. Of course, nobody has figured it out. But here are a few quotes that have helped me broaden my perspective. I hope they do the same for you.
“The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it’s not without doubt but in spite of doubt.”
-Rollo May
“The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.”
-Irvin Yalom
“It is dreadful when something naughs on your mind, not to have a soul to unburden yourself to. You know what I mean. I tell my piano the things I used to tell you.”
-Frederic chopin
“An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.”
-Albert Camus
“They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.”
-Dorothy Parker
“Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”
-Anais Nin
“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”
-Anais Nin
“Kiss me and you will see how important I am.”
-Sylvia Plath
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
-Viktor Frankl
“Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
-Viktor Frankl
“Every therapeutic cure, and still more, any awkward attempt to show the patient the truth, tears him from the cradle of his freedom from responsibility and must therefore reckon with the most vehement resistance.”
-Alfred Adler
“Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.”
-Jean-Paul Sartre
“It seems, in fact as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.”
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“How I Love Lucy was born? We decided that instead of divorce lawyers profiting from our mistakes, we’d profit from them.”
-Lucille Ball
“I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.”
-Vincent Van Gogh
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
-Carl Jung
“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
-Virginia Woolf
“A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
-William James
“If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
-Abraham Maslow
“At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.”
-Toni Morrison
“A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.”
-T. S. Eliot
“Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.”
-B. F. Skinner
“Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.”
-Sigmund Freud
“Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.”
-Maya Angelou
“Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”
-Carl Jung