“Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.”

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José Ortega Y Gasset85

Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist 1883–1955

Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary

“Many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather bring about his own ruin than his preservation.”

Niccolo Machiavelli book The Prince

Original: (it) Molti si sono immaginate Repubbliche e Principati, che non si sono mai visti nè cognosciuti essere in vero; perchè egli è tanto discosto da come si vive, a come si doveria vivere, che colui che lascia quello che si fa per quello che si doveria fare, impara piuttosto la rovina, che la preservazione sua.
Source: The Prince (1513), Ch. 15; translated by W. K. Marriot

“We have discovered that what a year ago seemed to be a neglected house is essentially a ruin.
This is not a pleasant fact, and it is not surprising that all of us are rather annoyed and disappointed about it.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

New Year's Address to the Nation (1991)

“Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost what the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.”

C.G. Jung book Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Chap. 11 (Psychotherapists or the Clergy), p. 229 http://books.google.com/books?id=mAsPAQAAIAAJ&q=%22Among+all+my+patients+in+the+second+half+of+life+that+is+to+say+over+thirty+five+there+has+not+been+one+whose+problem+in+the+last+resort+was+not+that+of+finding+a+religious+outlook+on+life%22&pg=PA229#v=onepage <br class="br">Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)