Psychotherapy RESOURCES AND REFERRALS for Adults & Adolescents

“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them.”
 — Epictetus (Greek philosopher associated with the Stoics, AD 55-c.135)

“Think your way through difficulties: harsh conditions can be softened, restricted ones can be widened, and heavy ones can weigh less on those who know how to bear them.” — Seneca

“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
— Albert Einstein

“We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
— Anais Nin

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
— Aristotle

“Everybody is a genius.  But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
— Albert Einstein

“Try to unlearn one thing every day.”
 — Folk Wisdom

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
— Max Planck

“[If I had sixty minutes to save the world] I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.”
— Albert Einstein

“Imagination is intervention, an act of defiance. It alters belief.”
— David Mura

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
— Krishnamurti

“All the art of living lies in the fine mingling of letting go and holding on.”
— Henry Ellis

In Book Six of Meditations, Marcus gives himself (and us) a command to keep an important idea in mind. “Meditate often,” he writes, “on the interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of all things in the universe.” He is speaking of the Stoic concept of Sympatheia, the idea that “all things are mutually woven together and therefore have an affinity for each other.
— Marcus Aurelius

“You’ve been made by nature for the purpose of working with others.” (8.12)
— Marcus Aurelius

One day Buddha was walking through a village. A very angry and rude young man came up and began insulting him. Buddha was not upset by the insults. Instead he asked the young man “Tell me, if you buy a gift for someone, and that person does not take it, to whom does the gift belong?”

The young man was surprised to be asked such a strange question and answered, “It would belong to me, because I bought the gift.” The Buddha smiled and said, “That is correct. And it is exactly the same with your anger. If you become angry with me and I do not get insulted, then the anger falls back on you. You are then the only one who becomes unhappy, not me. All you have done is hurt yourself.”

Before taking on someone else’s toxicity, ask yourself, “If someone offers you a gift, and you refuse to accept it, to whom does the gift belong?”
— Fake Buddha Quote

“Human beings have been made for the sake of one another. Teach them or endure them.” (8.59)
— Marcus Aurelius

"My weapon has always been language, and I’ve always used it,  but it has changed. Instead of shaping the words like knives now,  I think they’re flowers or bridges."   
— Sandra Cisneros

“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”
— Bertrand Russell

"An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of is individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity." — Martin Luther King, Jr.

"It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
— Jiddu Krishnamurti

If something bites you, it is inside of your clothes.
—Swahili proverb

“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”
 — Epictetus (Greek philosopher associated with the Stoics, AD 55-c.135)

“We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.” 
― Seneca

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
 — Theodore Roosevelt

“All your anxiety is because of your desire for harmony.  Seek disharmony and then you will find peace.”
 — Persian poet, circa 1207

“For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.”
— Viktor Frankl

“If I can't see around my personal story, I'll have no way to see situation-in-context: This is one event in a life of events. It is whatever it is, but it is temporal. The pain is terrible, but it won't last. I can manage it. Or this joy is incredible, but it won't last. Celebrate it now!” 
― Sylvia Boorstein

One must learn to love oneself...with a wholesome and healthy love, os that one can bear to be with oneself and need not roam.
— Friedrich Nietzsche

The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.
— Thich Nhat Hanh.

“The [one] who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in a moment of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing… not healing, not curing.. that is the [one] who cares.”
— Henri Nouwen

“To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.”
― Oscar Wilde

"Between stimulus and response there is a space; in that space lies our power to choose our response; in our response lies our growth and our freedom." - Viktor Frankl

"There is a difference between watching the mind and controlling the mind. Watching the mind with a gentle, open attitude allows the mind to settle down and come to rest. Trying to control the mind…just stirs up more agitation and suffering."
– Bhante Gunaratana

“Connecting to your breath when thoughts or images arise is like spotting a friend in a crowd: you don't have to shove everyone else aside or order them to go away; you just direct your attention, your enthusiasm, your interest toward your friend. 'Oh,' you think, 'there's my friend in that crowd. Oh, there's my breath, among those thoughts and feelings and sensations.” 
― Sharon Salzberg

“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

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist.”
— Oscar Wilde

“That which we can't remember, we will repeat.” — Sigmund Freud

“To become wise you must learn to listen to the wild dogs barking in your cellar.”
— Nietzsche

If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.
— Thomas Hardy

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”  
— Carl Jung

“It is a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
— Lewis Carroll

“Each individual has had experiences that taught him or her a lesson that had to be learned. If someone is stuck in a behavior pattern that provides little happiness, the pattern will continue for as long as is necessary to teach the individual what there is in that pattern that must be learned.”
— Camden Benares,  Zen without Zen Masters

“The aim of psychotherapy is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient and to help people to find ways to reorient themselves.”
 — Paraphrased from "What Life Asks of Us," New York Times, January 26, 2009.

“Psychotherapy is an effort to come to knowledgeable terms with the emotional pain from the past that cannot be killed or buried. In this way, as the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald puts it, "the ghosts which haunt us are laid to rest, to become our ancestors." Psychotherapy requires transforming the ghosts that haunt us into ancestors.”
 — Source: Website that is no longer on the internet

"[Depression] leave me be; give peace, and let me do the work of my life. I will never forget you."
— Andrew Solomon (The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, p169)

“There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you.”
— Zora Neale Hurston

“Sometimes a breakdown can be the beginning of a kind of break-through, a way of living in advance through a trauma that prepares you for a future of radical transformation.”
— Cherrie Moraga

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
— Anais Nin

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
— James Baldwin in conversation with Nikki Giovanni

Autobiography in Five Short Chapters

by Portia Nelson

I  
I walk down the street.  
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk  
I fall in.  
I am lost ... I am helpless.  
It isn't my fault.  
It takes me forever to find a way out. 
 
II  
I walk down the same street.  
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.  
I pretend I don't see it.  
I fall in again.  
I can't believe I am in the same place  
but, it isn't my fault.  
It still takes a long time to get out.  

III  
I walk down the same street.  
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.  
I see it is there.  
I still fall in ... it's a habit.  
my eyes are open  
I know where I am.  
It is my fault.  
I get out immediately.  

IV  
I walk down the same street.  
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.  
I walk around it.  

V  
I walk down another street.

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
— George Bernard Shaw

“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”
— Pablo Picasso

“The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.” 
—  Charles DuBois

“If you can really train people to get systematic about nurturing their creative process, it’s unbelievable what can happen. Most of that work relates to getting out of your own way at a very high level. It’s unlearning, it’s the constant practice of subtraction, reducing friction.”
– Josh Waitzkin

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.”
— Albert Einstein

“Action is eloquence.”
— William Shakespeare

“Happiness is directly correlated to the number of places you can sit in a day.”
 — Folk Wisdom

“You throw an anchor into the future you want to build, and you pull yourself along by the chain.”
— John O’Neal

“Opportunities multiply as they are seized.”
— Sun Tzu

"We are born in relationship, we are wounded in relationship, and we can be healed in relationship."
— Harville Hendrix

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.”
— Helen Keller

“Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth. To me, the function and duty of a quality human being, is the sincere and honest development of one's potential.”
— Bruce Lee

“God gave us imagination to compensate for what we don’t have. God granted us humour to compensate for what we do have.”
— Francis Bacon

“Each new breath is an opportunity to recommit oneself to life. Every day well-lived makes every yesterday a dream of contentment and every tomorrow a vision of hope.”
— Old Proverb

"Words are events, they do things, change things.
They transform both speaker and hearer;
they feed energy back and forth and amplify it."  
— Ursula K. Le Guin

The goal of therapy should not be, and cannot be, to help a client find themselves. Therapeutic intervention must be understood as facilitating the process by which a client creates themselves. On this point, Sigmund Freud quotes a poem in which the Romantic poet, Christian Heine, imagines God explaining Creation. Thus says God:
 
“Disease at bottom brought about
Creative urgence — for, creating,
I soon could feel the pain abating,
Creating, I could work it out.”
 
This emphasis on production and creation is liberating for both therapist and client because there is not then one “whole self” to try to return to, but rather, a multitude of possible creations. In other words, the traditional metaphor of a “return to health” limits one’s vision. With that orientation, the goal is always either to reproduce the past, or to pursue a fiction of a “health” that will forever be out of one’s reach. The metaphor of creation, in contrast, holds out the possibility of producing a multitude of possible better futures.

“The bright line that distinguishes the pursuit of excellence from perfectionism is the level of anxiety about making mistakes.”
— Thomas S. Greenspon, PhD, LMFT

“Striving for excellence motivates you; striving for perfection is demoralizing.”
— Harriet B. Braiker

“Healthy striving is self-focused: "How can I improve?" Perfectionism is other-focused: "What will they think?”
― Brené Brown

“The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.”
— Elbert Hubbard, The Note Book, 1927

“As long as the world is turning and spinning, we're gonna be dizzy and we're gonna make mistakes.”
— Mel Brooks

“The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.”
— Edward Phelps

“It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.”
— Ornette Coleman

"Failure is success in progress.”
— Albert Einstein

“Possibly the most useful trait in life is resilience, and you build resilience through experiencing difficulty and challenges. The same way you must break down your body to build up your muscle and bone, you must experience a healthy amount of adversity to build up your emotional and psychological strength.”
— Mark Manson

“While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior.”
— Henry C. Link

"I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty six times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
— Michael Jordan

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
— Thomas Edison, on his thousands of unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb.

"The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."
— Nelson Mandela

“Fall down seven times. Get up eight.”
— Japanese proverb

“A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying... that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.”
— Alexander Pope, in Swift, Miscellanies

The way to measure your progress is backward against where you started, not against your ideal.”
— Dan Sullivan, The Gain and the Gap

“Making a different mistake every day is not only acceptable, it is the definition of progress.”
— Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com

“Mistakes are the usual bridge between inexperience and wisdom.”
— Phyllis Theroux, Night Lights

“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
— John Powell

“Just because you make mistakes doesn't mean you are one.”
— Author Unknown

“The fundamental definition of self-esteem is your ability to see yourself as a flawed person and still hold yourself in high regard.” — Esther Perel

"Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in ...." 
 — Leonard Cohen

“The wholeness we strive for in our [mindfulness] practice is not a wholeness which comes from being impervious to harm, unbroken and unbent. Rather it is a wholeness which comes from holding our losses, lacks, needs and pains and making them whole with our kindness and compassion.” (IJS, Selections from Pri HaAretz) ... When righteous anger or heartbreak arise, we can remember this covenant of Shalom, where the wholeness and connectedness are the bigger picture, and the brokenness – which still needs our attention – is held within the wholeness."
— Rabbi Debra Rappaport

When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes. And he went WOW. That’s amazing!

And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.

— Kurt Vonnegut

“If you water a plant too much, it dies.  Even if you are watering it too much out of love, it still dies.”
— Ada Alden

“Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.”
— Dalai Lama

"A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness."
— Albert Einstein

“God gives food to every bird, but does not throw it into the nest.”
— Montenegrin proverb

“To know when you have enough is to be rich beyond measure.”
— Lao Tzu

I Wish You Enough
by Bob Perk

I wish you enough sun to keep your attitude bright.
I wish you enough rain to appreciate the sun more.
I wish you enough happiness to keep your spirit alive.
I wish you enough pain so that the smallest joys in life appear much bigger.
I wish you enough gain to satisfy your wanting.
I wish you enough loss to appreciate all that you possess.
I wish enough 'Hellos' to get you through the final 'Good-bye'.

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
— Viktor Frankl

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.”
 — Bruce Lee

“I say, empty your mind. 
Be formless, shapeless.
Like water.
Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup.
You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle.
You put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot.
Now water can flow,
Or it can crash.
Be water, my friend.”
 — Bruce Lee

“For something that is static, fixed, dead, there can be a way or a definite path; but not for anything that is moving and living.”
 — Bruce Lee

“A wise man hears one word and understands two.”
 — Yiddish Proverb

“It is because Humanity has never known where it is going that it has been able to find its way.”
—Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist

“You can't control the wind, but you can adjust your sails.”
 — Yiddish proverb

“All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.”
 — Henry Ellis

“Moderation in all things, including moderation.”
— Petronius

Quoting an analogy from the Roman playwright Terence, Schopenhauer writes: “Life is a game of dice. Even if you don’t throw the number you like, you still have to play it and play it well.”
— Schopenhauer

“Man cannot remake himself without suffering for he is both the marble and the sculptor.”
— Alexis Carrel

“What is courage? Courage is the willingness to risk failure…There is only one danger I find in life, and that, indeed, is a real one. You may take too many precautions.”
—Alfred Adler

“Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.”
— Ambrose Redmoon

“Courage is being afraid but going on anyhow.”
— Dan Rather

“One of therapy's impossible tasks is to help build resources that make it possible to tolerate therapy.”
— Michael Eigen

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
 —Anais Nin

"There is a difference between not being dead and being alive."
— Esther Perel

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
— Ernest Hemingway

“It's alright to have butterflies in your stomach. Just get them to fly in formation."
 — Dr. Rob Gilbert

“I've been absolutely terrified every minute of my life -- And I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”
— Georgia O'Keefe

“The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.”
— Steve Furtick

“The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.”
— Erich Fromm

“Normal fear protects us; abnormal fear paralyzes us. Normal fear motivates us to improve our individual and collective welfare; abnormal fear constantly poisons and distorts our inner lives. Our problem is not to be rid of fear but, rather to harness and master it.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.

“You have passed through life without an opponent—no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.”
— Seneca

“If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down but the staying down.”
 — Mary Pickford

“If you try and miss it’s not a failure. It’s only a loss.”
 — Unknown

“I didn't fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.”
— Benjamin Franklin

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
— Samuel Beckett

 “I can accept failure. Everyone fails at something. But I can not accept not trying.”
— Michael Jordan

“The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.”
— Unknown

“I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
— Michael Jordan

"My fear of failure never approached in magnitude my fear of ‘what if?’ What if I never tried at all?" 
— Will Ferrell

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”
— Khalil Gibran

“I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; I will not refuse to do the something I can do.”
— Helen Keller

“To live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
 — Howard Zinn

“Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”
— Malachy McCourt

“[One's] mood is your own personal weather.  And it’s very like the weather.  If you go outside and it’s raining, it’s not you that’s made it rain, it has rained and it’s real. You can’t un-think the rain.  You can’t say, "Walk it off and then it’ll be sunny!" The weather makes up its own mind.  And the two mistakes are to deny that its raining, when it clearly is, and the other thing is to say, "Therefore, my life is over. The sun will now never come out. That’s it." Because we all know in terms of the weather that it can be a damn nuisance when it’s raining, but that the sun will come out.”
— Stephen Fry

“Struggle is okay. There are no shortcuts. “There’s nothing wrong with taking the longer route. There’s nothing wrong with grinding. There’s nothing wrong with actually working and getting a little dirty. And getting some lessons from the dirt that you now have on your hands.”
— Kevin Hart

“Change looks impossible when you start, and looks inevitable after you’ve finished.”
— Bob Hunter

"If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito."
— Dalai Lama XIV

“No, I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
— Zora Neale Hurston

”Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
— Mary Oliver

“When you come out of the storm,
you won’t be the same person who walked in.
That’s what this storm’s all about.”
— Haruki Murakami

“I am Human and nothing human is alien to me…”
— Terence

“The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.”
—Alfred Adler

"When 'I' is replaced with 'we' even illness becomes wellness."
— Malcolm X

“Looking back, I have this to regret...that too often when I loved, I did not say so.” — David Grayson

“When depressed a person becomes invested in the safety of aloneness rather than the joys and pleasures of relatedness.”
 — Paul Russell

“The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.”
— Martin Buber

“One of the surest evidences of friendship that one individual can display to another is telling him gently of a fault. If any other can excel it, it is listening to such a disclosure with gratitude, and amending the error.”
— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Families
are held together by choice.
Members are alike and unalike,
yet there is comfort in the sameness
and excitement in the differences.
When we respect and relish
both conditions,
we can call ourselves
Family
— Maya Angelou (12/19/2008)

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other" doesn't make any sense.

— Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi - 13th century

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
— Mary Oliver

“Happiness is such a special thing that it doesn’t matter whose it is. If you’re happy or you make someone else happy, it’s just as good.”
— After Life, Ricky Gervais

“You have a ticket to the dance
and what a dance it is.”
— Unknown

“Let everything happen to you.
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate."
— Carl Jung

“You need to get used to winnowing your thoughts, so that if someone says, “What are you thinking about?”, you can respond at once.”
— Marcus Aurelius

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes."
— Carl Jung

“It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.”
— W. B. Yeats

“The cure for pain is in the pain.... Don’t ignore the wound. That is where the light comes in.”
— Rumi

"If we don't welcome our own wounds, we may be tempted to despise the wounded."
— Father Gregory Boyle

“How do I know what I think until I’ve had a chance to hear what I have to say?”
— E.M. Forster

“Being happy does not mean that everything is perfect. It means that you have decided to look beyond the imperfections.”
 — Epictetus (Greek philosopher associated with the Stoics, AD 55-c.135)

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
— The first sentence of Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina

“I wonder what kind of person I would be if I didn't worry so much about what kind of person you wanted.”
— E. Horne and J. Comeau

“If you hear that someone is speaking ill of you, instead of trying to defend yourself, you should say: 'He obviously does not know me very well, since there are so many other faults he could have mentioned.'”
 — Epictetus (Greek philosopher associated with the Stoics, AD 55-c.135)

“Wisdom comes with winters.”
—Oscar Wilde, A Florentine Tragedy

“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”
 — Epictetus (Greek philosopher associated with the Stoics, AD 55-c.135)

“The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.”
— Gloria Steinem

“Pretending that it can be when it can’t is how people break their hearts.”
— Elvin Semrad

Abraham Lincoln famously quipped, “I don't like that man. I must get to know him better." Paraphrasing Lincoln, a person suffering from depression would do well to say to themselves, "I don't like myself. I must get to know myself better.”
— Paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln

“Taking care of myself is a big job. No wonder I avoided it for so long.”
— Anonymous

It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.
— Donald W. Winnicott

The Guest House
by Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Here Bruce Lee is describing his attitude towards martial arts. From the context of the interview, it is clear that he would describe any art in the same terms, including the art of living:

“To me, ultimately, martial arts means honestly expressing yourself. Now, it is very difficult to do. I mean, it is easy for me to put on a show and be cocky, and be flooded with a cocky feeling, and then feel pretty cool, and all that. Or I can make all kinds of phony things. Blinded by it. Or I can show some really fancy movement. But to express oneself honestly, not lying to oneself, and to express myself honestly, now that, my friend, is very hard to do.”
 — Bruce Lee

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“To be nobody but myself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make me somebody else-means to fight the hardest battle any human can fight, and never stop fighting.”
— e.e. cummings

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”  
— Howard Thurman

"Fear takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."
— James Baldwin in conversation with Nikki Giovanni

”No one man can, for any considerable time, wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which is the true one.”
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Hard times arouse an instinctive desire for authenticity."
— Coco Chanel

“If you avoid conflict to keep the peace, you start a war inside yourself.”
— Cheryl Richardson

“One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.... Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."
— Oscar Wilde

Kafka offers a different take: ”I was ashamed of myself when I realized life was a costume party, and I attended with my real face.”
— Kafka

“Don't be so humble; you are not that great.”
 — Golda Meir (1898-1978) to a visiting diplomat

Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit
“Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.'

'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit.

'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.'

'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?'

'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. '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.”

REVELATION
by Robert Frost

We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.

'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are. 

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?...
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory…that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

— Nelson Mandela, 1994 inaugural speech, quoting Marianne Williamson,
"A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles."

“True happiness is not about getting what you want but coming to want and appreciate what you have.”
— Japanese Saying

"Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out."
— John R. Wooden

“This is a wonderful day. I have never seen this one before.”
— Maya Angelou

“When we focus on our gratitude, the tide of disappointment goes out and the tide of love rushes in.”
— Kristin Armstrong

“Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.”
— Voltaire

“What separates privilege from entitlement is gratitude.”
— Brené Brown

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”
— G.K. Chesterton

“He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.”
— Epictetus

“Wear gratitude like a cloak, and it will feed every corner of your life.”
— Rumi

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

“If a man insisted always on being serious, and never allowed himself a bit of fun and relaxation, he would go mad or become unstable without knowing it.”
 — Herodotus (c. 440 BCE)
________________________________

“A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.”

“This man has the mind of a 4-year old boy..and I bet he was glad to get rid of it.”

“Although it is generally known, I think it's about time to announce that I was born at a very early age.”

“Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others.”

“I worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.”

“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing...if you can fake that, you've got it made.”

“I sent the club a wire stating, Please accept my resignation.  I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”

“Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas and how he got in my pajamas I'll never know.”

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.”

“I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book.”

“I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.”

“Hello, I must be going.”