Karri > Karri's Quotes

“Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

“A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity,his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves.”
― Erich fromm, The Art of Being

“True personal growth is about transcending the part of you that is not okay and needs protection.”
― Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

“What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements.”
― Anais Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice.”
― Fromm, Eric, The Art of Loving

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“You," he said, "are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

“It is not seen as insane when a fighter, under an attack that will inevitable lead to his death, chooses to take his own life first. In fact, this act has been encouraged for centuries, and is accepted even now as an honorable reason to do the deed. How is it any different when you are under attack by your own mind?”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

“We are constantly trying to hold it all together. If you really want to see why you do things, then don't do them and see what happens.”
― Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

“The truth is that most of life will unfold in accordance with forces far outside your control, regardless of what your mind says about it”
― Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

“Do not let anything that happens in life be important enough that you’re willing to close your heart over it.”
― Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

“The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

“The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child. Love, being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, requires the developement of humility, objectivity and reason.

I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and his behavior, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person's reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

“Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.”
― John Steinbeck

“Step into the fire of self-discovery. This fire will not burn you, it will only burn what you are not.”
― Mooji

“Whatever comes, don’t push it away. When it goes, do not grieve.”
― Mooji

“A man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally, as animals conceive at certain seasons their kind only. We hear and apprehend only what we already half know. If there is something which does not concern me, which is out of my line, which by experience or by genius my attention is not drawn to, however novel and remarkable it may be, if it is spoken, we hear it not, if it is written, we read it not, or if we read it, it does not detain us. Every man thus tracks himself through life, in all his hearing and reading and observation and traveling. His observations make a chain. The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest which he has observed, he does not observe. By and by we may be ready to receive what we cannot receive now. I find, for example, in Aristotle some thing about the spawning, etc., of the pout and perch, because I know something about it already and have my attention aroused; but I do not discover till very late that he has made other equally important observations on the spawning of other fishes, because I am not interested in those fishes.”
― Henry David Thoreau, I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau

“If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.”
― Henry David Thoreau, I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau

“He looked so pained that I dreamed of taking his hands and making him dance”
― Andrea Levy, Small Island

“There are some words that once spoken will split the world in two. There would be the life before you breathed them and then the altered life after they'd been said. They take a long time to find, words like that. They make you hesitate. Choose with care. Hold on to them unspoken for as long as you can just so your world will stay intact.”
― Andrea Levy, Small Island

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
― James A. Baldwin

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
― James Baldwin

“If you can't make it good, at least make it look good.”
― Bill Gates

“I am not a graceful person. I am not a Sunday morning or a Friday sunset. I am a Tuesday 2 a.m., gunshots muffled by a few city blocks, I am a broken window during February. My bones crack on a nightly basis. I fall from elegance with a dull thud, and I apologize for my awkward sadness. I sometimes believe that I don’t belong around people, that I belong to all the leap days that didn’t happen. The way light and darkness mix under my skin has become a storm. You don’t see the lightning, but you hear the echoes.”
― Anna Peters