These are quotes, bits of writing, and poetry that I have collected over the years. In alphabetic order. Poetry at the bottom.
“I’d rather be whole than good.”
— Carl Jung
“You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
— The Velveteen Rabbit
“We are more real in our simple want to find a way than any destination we could reach.”
— David Whyte
“Therapy without mindfulness takes us only to the point of resolving our predicament. Mindfulness with therapy helps us to resolve the ego that got us into it in the first place.”
— David Richo
“May you have the courage to listen to the voice of desire that disturbs you when you have settled for something safe. May you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own unease…”
— John O’Donohue
“If you don’t worry about how legitimate your [feeling] is, then you can feel it more legitimately.”
— Esther Perel
“The intellect should simplify things, not make them more cerebral.”
— Matthew McConaughey
“If you want to become a different person, you have to start by being who you are.”
— James Low
“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.”
— Pema Chödrön
“Pleasure is great, but pain is increased surface area with which to touch others; this is a unique, brutal gift of intimacy.”
— Aella
“The most amazing people I’ve met aren’t interested in power or money, but are interested in laughter, courage, and grace under duress — holding hands against the darkness, finding new ways to solve old problems, and being attentive, tender, and kind to every sort of being.”
— Brian Doyle
“It begins in wonder, intuition, ambiguity, puzzlement, and uncertainty. It progresses into being unpacked, inspected from all angles, and wrestled into linearity by the left hemisphere. But its endpoint is to see that the very business of language and linearity must themselves be transcended and once more left behind. The progression is thus from right hemisphere to left hemisphere to right hemisphere again.”
— Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary
“We cannot selectively numb emotions. When we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.”
— Brené Brown
“I don’t want a spiritual awakening.
I’d rather have an instinctual remembering.
I don’t want to spend my time on earth trying to transcend the fact that I’m here.
I’d rather spend my time being more fully in relationship to the here and now.”
— Emily Athena Abrahams
“I realized I yearned to find the divinity in others — divinity that they already held but might be hidden from both of us like a puzzle, and solving the puzzle together with another seemed delightful.”
— Aella