Micko

@Micko, member from June 4, 2020
Rollo May photo

“The value of dreams, like … divinations, is not that they give a specific answer, but that they open up new areas of psychic reality, shake us out of our customary ruts, and throw light on a new segment of our lives.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 5 : The Delphic Oracle as Therapist, p. 106
Context: The value of dreams, like … divinations, is not that they give a specific answer, but that they open up new areas of psychic reality, shake us out of our customary ruts, and throw light on a new segment of our lives. Thus the sayings of the shrine, like dreams, were not to be received passively; the recipients had to "live" themselves into the message.

Rollo May photo

“It is interesting that the term mystic is used in this derogatory sense to mean anything we cannot segmentize and count. The odd belief prevails in our culture that a thing or experience is not real if we cannot make it mathematical, and that somehow it must be real if we can reduce it to numbers.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Existence (1956) p. 39; also published in The Discovery of Being : Writings in Existential Psychology (1983), Part III : Contributions to Therapy, Ch. 6 : To Be and Not to Be, p. 94
Existence (1958)
Context: It is interesting that the term mystic is used in this derogatory sense to mean anything we cannot segmentize and count. The odd belief prevails in our culture that a thing or experience is not real if we cannot make it mathematical, and that somehow it must be real if we can reduce it to numbers. But this means making an abstraction out of it … Modern Western man thus finds himself in the strange situation, after reducing something to an abstraction, of having then to persuade himself it is real. … the only experience we let ourselves believe in as real, is that which precisely is not.

Rollo May photo

“Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 1 : The Courage to Create, p. 32
Context: Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society. For they are the bearers of the human being's age old capacity to be insurgent. They love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.

Rollo May photo

“Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 6 : On the Limits of Creativity, p. 115
Context: Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

Rollo May photo

“This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

As quoted in Think and Grow Rich : A Black Choice (1991) by Dennis Kimbro and Napoleon Hill, p. 104
Context: Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.

Arthur Schopenhauer photo

“The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

Source: Religion: A Dialogue and Other Essays

Nathaniel Hawthorne photo

“To do nothing is the way to be nothing.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)
Bram Stoker photo

“We learn of great things by little experiences.”

Source: The Jewel of Seven Stars

Miguel de Cervantes photo

“Time ripens all things. No man is born wise. Bishops are made of men and not of stones.”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part II (1615), Book III, Ch. 33. Note: "Time ripens all things" is the translator's interpolation and does not appear in the original Spanish text.

Ray Bradbury photo

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

As quoted in "Bradbury Still Believes in Heat of ‘Fahrenheit 451’" http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19930312&slug=1689996, interview by Misha Berson, in ', credited to "Ray Bradbury, quoted by Misha Berson in Seattle Times", in "Quotable Quotes", The Reader's Digest, Vol. 144, No. 861, January 1994, p. 25 http://books.google.com/books?output=html&id=ZqqUAAAAIAAJ&q=%22people+to+stop+reading%22#search_anchor), or an indirect reference to the re-quoting in Reader's Digest (such as: The Times Book of Quotations (Philip Howard, ed.), 2000, Times Books and HarperCollins, p. 93
Variant: We're not teaching kids to read and write and think. … There's no reason to burn books if you don't read them.
As quoted in "At 80, Ray Bradbury Still Fighting the Future He Foresaw" http://www.raybradbury.com/articles_peoria.html, interview by Roger Moore, in The Peoria Journal Star (August 2000)
Context: The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us – it's all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind. … You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Roald Dahl photo
Fyodor Dostoyevsky photo

“I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Russian author

Personal correspondence (1839), as quoted in Dostoevsky: His Life and Work (1971) by Konstantin Mochulski, as translated by Michael A. Minihan, p. 17
Context: To study the meaning of man and of life — I am making significant progress here. I have faith in myself. Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.

Ian Fleming photo

“A woman can put up with almost anything; anything but indifference.”

Ian Fleming (1908–1964) English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer
Ian Fleming photo
Krzysztof Kieślowski photo

“None of the films is about me. Not a single one. None. I have my life and I'll simply never tell anyone what part of me is in my films.”

Krzysztof Kieślowski (1941–1996) Polish film director and screenwriter

As quoted in "Kieślowski's Many Colours" by Patrick Abrahamsson, in Oxford University Student newspaper (2 June 1995)
Context: I don't make biographical films … None of the films is about me. Not a single one. None. I have my life and I'll simply never tell anyone what part of me is in my films. I won't ever tell anyone about that, because I don't consider that to be anyone else's business but mine. Nobody will guess where and how and in what way I fill them with my own pains. And that's an intimate aspect of my work that I keep to myself. … I won't even tell my wife — ever.

Plutarch photo
Petronius photo

“Beauty and wisdom are rarely conjoined.”

Sec. 94
Satyricon

Leon M. Lederman photo

“I went into physics to hang around with the bright kids. I wasn't doing anything else and I didn't want to look dumb, so I thought I'd pretend to be a physicist, just like the others. It was five or ten years after my Ph. D. before I realized I was pretty good.”

Leon M. Lederman (1922–2018) American mathematician and physicist

From Subatomic World Explorer, as noted on American Academy of Achievement web site http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/led0pro-1 (URL accessed on October 20, 2008)

James Joyce quote: “Life is too short to read a bad book.”
James Joyce photo

“Life is too short to read a bad book.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet
Heinrich Heine photo

“The more i get to know people, the more i like dogs.”

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic