“Sometimes we might try to assume responsibility for a major disaster in order to avoid responsibility for our own destructive behaviour.”
Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life (Page 143)
“‘Success has ruined many a man,’ Benjamin Franklin once said. This is true enough, but what Franklin didn’t mention is that we often work the ruin upon ourselves.”
Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life (Page 132)
“Problems are not problems at all, but results that are dissatisfying.”
Jerry Gillies, via Sunbeams (Page 55)
“Who is more foolish, the child afraid of the dark or the man afraid of the Light?”
Maurice Freehill, via Sunbeams (Page 55)
“Happy is the person who can improve others, not only when present, but even when in their thoughts!”
Seneca, Moral Letters, via The Daily Stoic (Page 79)
“We are vehemently faithful to our own view of the world, our story. We want to know what new story we’re stepping into before we exit the old one. We don’t want an exit if we don’t know exactly where it is going to take us, even—or perhaps especially—in an emergency. This is so, I hasten to add, whether we are patients or psychoanalysts.”
Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life (Page 123)
“At one time or another, we all try to silence painful emotions. But when we succeed in feeling nothing we lose the only means we have of knowing what hurts us, and why.”
Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life (Page 27)
“Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time.”
Hebrew proverb, via Sunbeams (Page 54)
“Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.”
Richard Bach, via Sunbeams (Page 54) (Read Matt’s Blog on this quote)
“Above all, keep a close watch on this—that you are never so tied to your former acquaintances and friends that you are pulled down to their level. If you don’t you’ll be ruined… You must choose whether to be loved by these friends and remain the same person, or to become a better person at the cost of those friends… if you try to have it both ways you will neither make progress nor keep what you once had.”
Epictetus, Discourses, via The Daily Stoic (Page 79)
“Poverty is not the absence of goods, but rather the overabundance of desire.”
Plato, via Sunbeams (Page 53)
“They are so concerned for their life that their anxiety makes life unbearable, even when they have the things they think they want. Their very concern for enjoyment makes them unhappy… I will hold to the saying that: ‘Perfect joy is to be without joy. Perfect praise is to be without praise.’ If you ask ‘what ought to be done’ and ‘what ought not to be done’ on earth in order to produce happiness, I answer that these questions do not have an answer. There is no way of determining such things…”
Thomas Merton, The Way Of Chuang Tzu, via Sunbeams (Page 53)
“If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you’d be furious. Yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along, so they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled—have you no shame in that?”
Epictetus, via The Daily Stoic (Page 78)
“There’s a time in every kid’s life when they’re still drawing every day and playing basketball every day. Then there’s a day when they stop drawing and keep playing basketball. They keep playing basketball because their parents do, and their parents don’t draw. At some point they’re like, ‘That can’t be cool because my parents don’t do it.’ You don’t think you’re cool, but if your kid says, ‘Dad, will you play with me?’ and you say, ‘Not now, I’m drawing,’ that kid is going to start drawing because that’s cool to them.”
Mo Willems
“I don’t praise a small child for doing what they ought to be able to do. I praise them when they do something really difficult—like sharing a toy or showing patience. I also think it is important to say ‘thank you.’ When I’m slow in getting a snack for a child, or slow to help them and they have been patient, I thank them. But I wouldn’t praise a child who is playing or reading.”
Charlotte Stiglitz, via The Examined Life (Page 21)
“Experience has taught me that our childhoods leave in us stories like this—stories we never found a way to voice, because no one helped us to find the words. When we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us—we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don’t understand.”
Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life (Page 10)
“Change and loss are deeply connected—there cannot be change without loss.”
Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life (Page xii)
“Sport is where an entire life can be compressed into a few hours, where the emotions of a lifetime can be felt on an acre or two of ground, where a person can suffer and die and rise again on six miles of trails through a New York City park. Sport is a theater where sinner can turn saint and a common man become an uncommon hero, where the past and future can fuse with the present. Sport is singularly able to give us peak experiences where we feel completely one with the world and transcend all conflicts as we finally become our own potential.”
George A. Sheehan, via Sunbeams (Page 52)
“You are here to aid in the great expansion of consciousness. You are not here to cry about the miseries of the human condition but to change them when you do not find them to your liking through the joy, strength, and vitality that is within you; to create the spirit as faithfully and beautifully as you can in flesh.”
Jane Roberts, The Nature Of Personal Reality, via Sunbeams (Page 52)