The first forty years of life furnish the text, while the remaining thirty supply the commentary;
and without the commentary we are unable to understand aright the true sense and coherence of the text, together with the moral it contains.
Schopenhauer Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, Chapter 6,
One of the first things you learn when you travel is that
nowhere is magical unless you can bring the right eyes to it.
You take an angry man to the Himalayas, he just starts complaining about the food.
Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness
Our present lives are dominated by the goddess Reason,
who is our greatest and most tragic illusion.
By the aid of reason, so we assure ourselves, we have “conquered nature”.
Jung
Some lives have very strong internal observers: the parent, critic, authority figure or imagined public.
I lived so carefully,
thinking someone was watching.
But the stage was empty;
the audience never came.
Attributed to Osamu Dazai, modern Japanese author of No Longer Human
The glory of God is a human being fully alive
Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book IV, 20.7
Anxiety was born in the very same moment as mankind. And since we will never be able to master it,
We will have to learn to live with it –
just as we have learned to live with storms.
Paulo Coelho
If you feel that your dreams aren’t coming true, you might think that you need to do more, or to think and strategize more.
In fact, what you might need is less – less noise coming to you from both inside and outside -so that you have the space for your heart’s truest intention to germinate and flourish
Thich Nhat Hanh, Silence
