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“We kill all the caterpillars, then complain there are no butterflies.”
― John Marsden, The Dead of Night

“The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp.”
― John Berry

“Why not go out on a limb? Isn’t that where the fruit is?”
― Frank Scully

“Your body does not eliminate poisons by knowing their names. To try to control fear or depression or boredom by calling them names is to resort to superstition of trust in curses and invocations. It is so easy to see why this does not work. Obviously, we try to know, name, and define fear in order to make it “objective,” that is, separate from “I.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.”
― Socrates

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”
― Alan Watts

“Poetry: the best words in the best order.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“A picture can tell a thousand words,
but a few words can change it’s story.”
― Sebastyne Young

“The art of not experiencing feelings. A child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother's love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress emotions.”
― Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

“Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.”
― Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

“The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden; what is forbidden is to write about it.”
― Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child

“One can only remember what has been consciously experienced.”
― Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

“If someday I make a dictionary of definitions wanting single words to head them, a cherished entry will be "To abridge, expand, or otherwise alter or cause to be altered for the sake of belated improvement, one's own writings in translation.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Silence is so accurate.”
― Mark Rothko

“The main reason for the terrible cruelty between men today, apart from the absence religion, is still the refined complexity of life which shields people from the consequences of their actions. However cruel Attila, Genghis Khan and their followers may have been, the act of killing people personally, face to face, must have been unpleasant: the wailing relatives and the presence of the corpses. And thus their cruelty was restrained. Nowadays we kill people through such a complex process of communication, and the consequences of our cruelty are so carefully removed and concealed from us, that there is no restraint on the bestiality of the action.”
― Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings

“I made this [letter] very long, because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter.”
― Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters

“Until you are willing to be confused about what you already know, what you know will never grow bigger, better, or more useful.”
― Milton Erickson & Rossi

“When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it's amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children.”
― Greg Mortenson, Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

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

“When I say that evil has to do with killing, I do not mean to restrict myself to corporeal murder. Evil is that which kills spirit. There are various essential attributes of life -- particularly human life -- such as sentience, mobility, awareness, growth, autonomy, will. It is possible to kill or attempt to kill one of these attributes without actually destroying the body. Thus we may "break" a horse or even a child without harming a hair on its head.

Erich Fromm was acutely sensitive to this fact when he broadened the definition of necrophilia to include the desire of certain people to control others-to make them controllable, to foster their dependency, to discourage their capacity to think for themselves, to diminish their unpredectibility and originalty, to keep them in line. Distinguishing it from a "biophilic" person, one who appreciates and fosters the variety of life forms and the uniqueness of the individual, he demonstrated a "necrophilic character type," whose aim it is to avoid the inconvenience of life by transforming others into obedient automatons, robbing them of their humanity.

Evil then, for the moment, is the force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness.”
― M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil

“Discipline is remembering what you want.”
― David Campbell