“No matter how tired you get, no matter how you feel like you can’t possibly do this, somehow you do.” …
“Survival often depends on a specific focus: a relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility.” …
“Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.” …
“Human lives… are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence… into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life.” …
“There is only one world. Things outside only exist if you go to meet them with everything you carry in yourself. As to the things inside, you will never see them well unless you allow those outside to enter in.” …
“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.” …
“There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.” …
This is the supreme challenge of intimacy — how to reconcile the aching yearning for closeness with the painful pressures of actually being close, how to forge a bond tight enough to feel the warmth of connection but spacious enough to feel free. Kahlil Gibran knew this when he contemplated the vital balance of intimacy and independence, urging lovers to “love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.” Rilke knew it when he reckoned with the difficult art of giving space in love, observing that… read article …
“The chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished.” …
“If you don’t know what to say, start by saying that… That opens things up.” …
“You may be weaker than the whole world but you are always stronger than yourself. Let me send my power against my power… Let me discover what it is that I want and fear from love. Power and love, might and grace.” …
“While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.” …
“We create ourselves. The sequence is suffering, insight, will, action, change.” …
“The emotional life is not simply a part or an aspect of human life. It is not, as we so often think, subordinate, or subsidiary to the mind. It is the core and essence of human life. The intellect arises out of it, is rooted in it, draws its nourishment and sustenance from it.” …
“It’s part of being human to fall short of that total acceptance and ultimate understanding — and often far short.” …
“We are never simply seeing what’s ‘really there,’ stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom — the product of deep-set predictions.” …
“We are carriers of spirit… into a future unknown, unknowable, and in continual creation.” …
“This has nothing to do with premonitions, there is nothing supernatural or mysterious about it, what’s mysterious is that we pay no heed to it.” …
“To despair over oneself, in despair to want to be rid of oneself, is the formula for all despair.” …
“The most comprehensive formulation of therapeutic goals is the striving for wholeheartedness: to be without pretense, to be emotionally sincere, to be able to put the whole of oneself into one’s feelings, one’s work, one’s beliefs. It can be approximated only to the extent that conflicts are resolved.” …
“Neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer.” …
The psychological machinery of our commonest coping mechanism for the terror of hurt, rejection, and abandonment. …
“Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back.” …
“Self-knowledge… is not an aim in itself, but a means of liberating the forces of spontaneous growth. In this sense, to work at ourselves becomes not only the prime moral obligation, but… the prime moral privilege.” …