Steffan Bard > Steffan's Quotes

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King

“Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.”
― John Lennon

“Everything will be all right in the end. If it’s not all right, it is not yet the end”....... Patel, Hotel Manager, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”
― Patel

“Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself—and there isn’t one.”
― Wei Wu Wei

“The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Wisdom is knowing I am nothing,
Love is knowing I am everything,
and between the two my life moves.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Once you realize that the road is the goal and that you are always on the road, not to reach a goal, but to enjoy its beauty and its wisdom, life ceases to be a task and becomes natural and simple, in itself an ecstasy.”
― Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact, he found. You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers. You start to be afraid of the very thing you need most. John calls this a “snowball” effect, as disconnection spirals into more disconnection. Lonely people are scanning for threats because they unconsciously know that nobody is looking out for them, so no one will help them if they are hurt. This snowball effect, he learned, can be reversed—but to help a depressed or severely anxious person out of it, they need more love, and more reassurance, than they would have needed in the first place. The tragedy, John realized, is that many depressed and anxious people receive less love, as they become harder to be around. Indeed, they receive judgment, and criticism, and this accelerates their retreat from the world. They snowball into an ever colder place.”
― Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions

“You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met.”
― Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

“I kept noticing a self-help cliché that people say to each other all the time, and share on Facebook incessantly. We say to each other: “Nobody can help you except you.” It made me realize: we haven’t just started doing things alone more, in every decade since the 1930s. We have started to believe that doing things alone is the natural state of human beings, and the only way to advance. We have begun to think: I will look after myself, and everybody else should look after themselves, as individuals. Nobody can help you but you. Nobody can help me but me. These ideas now run so deep in our culture that we even offer them as feel-good bromides to people who feel down—as if it will lift them up. But John has proven that this is a denial of human history, and a denial of human nature. It leads us to misunderstand our most basic instincts. And this approach to life makes us feel terrible.”
― Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

“Despair often happens, he had learned, when there is a “lack of balance between efforts and rewards.”
― Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

“The Italian philosopher Paolo Virno says we have moved from having a “proletariat”—a solid block of manual workers with jobs—to a “precariat,” a shifting mass of chronically insecure people who don’t know whether they will have any work next week and may never have a stable job.”
― Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

“The more you think life is about having stuff and superiority and showing it off, the more unhappy, and the more depressed and anxious, you will be.”
― Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy, truth liberates.”
― Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“In fact, we or someone else can become terrifying, even while we are trying to save the day by insisting others be more egalitarian and conscious. Often such well-meaning, group "consciousness bringers" are unaware of how they push others about. Any one of us can unwittingly hurt others simply by being unaware of the powers we have and how we use them. If we are not careful, the very attempt to "raise consciousness" can simply recycle the very abusive behavior we hope to correct.”
― Arnold Mindell, The Deep Democracy of Open Forums: Practical Steps to Conflict Prevention and Resolution for the Family, Workplace, and World

“if you are consistently afraid of groups, perhaps you are either too ambitious and want to save everyone, or think that you must be managing the situations at hand.
In this case, it may be helpful to remember that if you want to do too much, you will have to depend on using your own power, and that dependence will exhaust you and make you uncertain. We do not need leaders who can change the world because of their personal power, because change is inherent in people and nature. Our communities, however, need our essential selves and our awareness, not our power, to notice and track such changes.
Our world needs our awareness of the roles, themes, and feelings we experience. Insecurity occurs if we push to succeed. Let nature help with the work. We do not need more of the standard kind of leaders, but instead are looking for sensitive facilitators with moment-to-moment awareness.”
― Arnold Mindell, The Deep Democracy of Open Forums: Practical Steps to Conflict Prevention and Resolution for the Family, Workplace, and World

“All theories of violence have a piece in the picture. To see the whole picture, however, we need to consider all theories simultaneously. We cannot separate one issue or approach from another. For example, while working on nationality factors that contribute to violence, we must remember economics. While working on economics, we must remember race and gender. While working on sexism we have to remember health issues. While working on health issues we have to remember sexual orientation. While working on sexual orientation we have to remember racism.
We need multileveled awareness. While considering social issues, we must remember biology and genetics, the warrior instinct, and appreciate the diversity in religious viewpoints as well.”
― Arnold Mindell, The Deep Democracy of Open Forums: Practical Steps to Conflict Prevention and Resolution for the Family, Workplace, and World

“if you can feel into both sides and articulate them, growing together happens. The solution to war is not peace but growing together.”
― Arnold Mindell, The Deep Democracy of Open Forums: Practical Steps to Conflict Prevention and Resolution for the Family, Workplace, and World

“It has been my hope that now, without more war, we can learn from history that we are more than one side or the other. The unresolved
suffering caused by hurt and its result, unrelenting retaliation, can only dissolve by detachment from one role or the other. Perennial spiritual wisdom teaches the same principle: detach from this world, this person, her successes, and failures.
Until now, such detachment meant nonviolence and the transcendence of the material plane. Now detachment can have another meaning. Detachment must no longer lead to disinterest in and disconnection from the world, but to a new kind of immersion in the Dreaming. This kind of immersion in conflicts, coupled with appreciation of all sides, can replace transcendence as a goal.”
― Arnold Mindell, The Deep Democracy of Open Forums: Practical Steps to Conflict Prevention and Resolution for the Family, Workplace, and World

“expecting those with rank to recognize their unconsciousness means asking that they be of a higher spiritual and intellectual caliber than the rest of the participants. While this demand seems, at first, to be warranted, it usually meets with resistance because those with rank experience themselves as being oppressed, first, by the participants who are criticizing them, then by the facilitators. The people who revolt against rank are, in the moment of attack, not only victims, but also powerful in a sort of spiritual way. They feel empowered by their quest for “justice.” Like those who provoked them, however, they are often unconscious of their power. Victims don’t automatically deserve halos.”
― Arnold Mindell, Sitting in the Fire: Large Group Transformation Using Conflict and Diversity

“We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
― Terence McKenna

“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”
― Terence McKenna

“The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation”
― Terence Mckenna

“You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.”
― Terence McKenna

“If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.”
― Terence McKenna

“We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.”
― Terence McKenna

“The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.”
― Carl R. Rogers

“As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
― Carl Jung