Schopenhauer and Racism

Jun 232010
 

I just came across Schopenhauer’s justification for racism.

The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste or race is fairer in colour than the rest and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmins, the Incas, and the rulers of the South Sea Islands. All this is due to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention because those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want and misery, which in their many forms were brought about by the climate. This they had to do in order to make up for the parsimony of nature and out of it all came their high civilization.

Similar to Kant and Hegel, Schopenhauer had a hierarchical racial concept of history. His corollary: the lighter in skin tone the more advanced in civilization the individual, even within a given racial group.

Robofetishism and Technosexuality

Jun 202010
 

Technosexuality is fast becoming de rigour amongst the MTV generation, with their vibrating mobile WAP phones “going off” in their pockets, computer peripherals and multi-function entertainment systems. Found in all walks of life they can often be found hanging around electrical stores, exchanging glances over 32″ LCD TV screens with integrated DVD players.

Technosexuality may be expressed in a number of divergent ways, from dressing up as popular characters from Sci Fi stories, to rubbing themselves against toasters and vending machines. Several cases have been reported of people gaining sexual pleasure from slamming their genitals in fridge doors, though this is not confirmed as technosexual behaviour at this time.

Germaine Greer Quotes

Jun 192010
 

The most powerful entities on earth are not governments but the multi-national corporations that see women as their territory, indoctrinating them with their versions of beauty, health and hygiene, medicating them and cultivating their dependency in order to medicate them some more.

Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They’ve become suspicious about it. Like beasts, for example, who are castrated in farming in order to serve their master’s ulterior motives — to be fattened or made docile — women have been cut off from their capacity for action. It’s a process that sacrifices vigour for delicacy and succulence, and one that’s got to be changed.

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace, and wit, reminders of order, calm, and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep, and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still, and absorbed.

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.

Most people die in improvised circumstances of harassment and confusion, whether in hospital or out of it.

While young fools of my generation produced terrifying symptoms by ingesting poisons of various synthetic kinds, I was taken to extraordinary realms by a bacillus carried from human excrement by a fly’s foot. I swelled to the size of a mountain and shrank to the size of a pin, flew and sang and fell through exotic configurations, in the intervals between agonizing convulsions on the heavy earthenware vaso, whose lethal contents I had to dispose of in the fields when the fever subsided. When the burning and shivering stopped and I could see again only what was there, I stayed enthralled by clarity. There was nothing to me in biochemical mindbending or bullshit psychedelia that did not have the slimy scent of death about it. I hated being out of touch, isolated by the solipsism of delirium, unable to communicate or comprehend.

The most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity.

They still say “fuck you” as a venomous insult; they still find “cunt” the most degrading epithet outside the dictionary.

Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.

The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people’s reproductive behaviour, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world belongs to us, who have so expertly depleted its resources, rather than to them, who have not.

Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.

The pain of sexual frustration, of repressed tenderness, of denied curiosity, of isolation in the ego, of greed, suppressed rebellion, of hatred poisoning all love and generosity, permeates our sexuality. What we love we destroy.

A woman’s pleasure is not dependent upon the presence of a penis in the vagina; neither is a man’s.

The element of heroic maleness had always been present in the concept of the artist as one who rides the winged horse above the clouds beyond the sight of lesser men, a concept seldom applied to those who worked with colours until the nineteenth century. When the inevitable question is asked, “Why are there no great women artists?” it is this dimension of art that is implied. The askers know little of art, but they know the seven wonders of the painting world.

Once a paper admits any principle of censorship for survival, the we-don’t-want-to-do-it-but-we-don’t-want-to-lose-the-printer kind of censorship, it jeopardizes the integrity of its editorial principle. It’s better to print and be damned, because you’ll be damned anyway.

Kinkiness comes from low energy. It’s the substitution of lechery for lust.

Women have been charged with deviousness and duplicity since the dawn of civilization so they have never been able to pretend that their masks were anything but masks. It is a slender case but perhaps it does mean that women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.

Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.

The term eunuchs was used by Eldridge Cleaver to describe blacks. It occurred to me that women were in a somewhat similar position. Blacks had been emancipated from slavery but never given any kind of meaningful freedom, while women were given the vote but denied sexual freedom. In the final analysis, women aren’t really free until their libidos are recognized as separate entities. Some of the suffragettes understood this. They could see the connection among the vote, political power, independence and being able to express their sexuality according to their own experience, instead of in reference to a demand by somebody else. But they were regarded as crazy and were virtually crucified. Thinking about them, I suddenly realized, Christ, we’ve been castrated and that’s what it’s all about. You see, it’s all very well to let a bullock out into the field when you’ve already cut his balls off, because you know he’s not going to do anything. That’s exactly what happened to women.

Regardless of the dutiful pushing of condoms in the girls’ press, the exposure of baby vaginas and cervixes to the penis is more likely to result in pregnancy and infection than orgasm.

If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood – if it makes you sick, you’ve got a long way to go, baby.

We can put women on Prozac and they will think they are happy, even though they are not. Disturbed animals in the zoo are given Prozac too, which rather suggests that misery is a response to unbearable circumstances rather than constitutional.

The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well. It is unlikely that the techniques of liberation spontaneously adopted by women will be in such fierce conflict as exists between warring self-interests and conflicting dogmas, for they will not seek to eliminate all systems but their own. However diverse they may be, they need not be utterly irreconcilable, because they will not be conquistatorial.

If the next time our governments propose to make war on a helpless civilian population we were to uncover our grief and guilt instead of our anger, how much difference might we make?

Louis-Ferdinand Céline Quotes

Jun 142010
 

If you aren’t rich you should always look useful.

One might as well realize that in everyday life at least a hundred people thirst for you miserable life in the course of a single day.

We are, by nature, so futile that distraction alone can prevent us from dying altogether.

I have never voted in my life… I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it’s certain they will win.

People always seem to be struggling in a general suicide.

The rich are inebriate in another way and cannot contrive to grasp these frenzied longings for security. To be rich is another form of intoxication: it spells forgetfulness. In fact, that is what one wants riches for: to forget.

The public is like a woman, it wants to be fucked.

The natives, by and large, had to be driven to work with clubs, they preserved that much dignity, whereas the whites, perfected by public education, worked of their own free will.

Men seem to feel a huge, absolutely unbearable terror that they will find themselves one fine day alone, quite alone, faced with nothingness.

It’s harder to lose the wish to love than the wish to live.

One human being can only tolerate another human being, and rather like him, if he plays the part of an admiring doormat.

I cannot refrain from doubting that there exist any genuine realizations of our deepest character except war and illness, those two infinities of nightmare.

Behind all music we ought to try and catch that noiseless tone thats made for us, the melody of death.

Almost every desire a poor man has is a punishable offence.

Experience is a dim lamp, which only lights the one who bears it.

The Choice Between Capitalism and Socialism

Jun 072010
 

A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

Sickness Quotes

Jun 052010
 

Childhood is a disease – a sickness that you grow out of.
- William Golding

I’m tired of hearing sin called sickness and alcoholism a disease. It is the only disease I know of that we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to spread.
- Vance Havner

Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, sickness and captivity would, without this comfort, be insupportable.
- William Samuel Johnson

A lot of people don’t realize that depression is an illness. I don’t wish it on anyone, but if they would know how it feels, I swear they would think twice before they just shrug it.
- Jonathan Davis

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.
- Theodor Adorno

Concealing an illness is like keeping a beach ball under water.
- Karen Duffy

We are not victims of aging, sickness and death. These are part of scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being.
- Deepak Chopra

Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.
- Sigmund Freud

The Roman Catholic Church Comparison to Atheism

Jun 052010
 

Roman Catholicism is even worse than Atheism itself, in my opinion! Yes, that’s my opinion! Atheism only preaches a negation, but Catholicism goes further: it preaches a distorted Christ, a Christ calumniated and defamed by themselves, the opposite of Christ! It preaches the Antichrist, I declare it does, I assure you it does! This is the conviction I have long held, and it has distressed me, myself… Roman Catholicism cannot hold its position without universal political supremacy, and cries: ‘Non possumus!’ To my thinking Roman Catholicism is not even a religion, but simply the continuation of the Western Roman Empire, and everything in it is subordinated to that idea, faith to begin with. The Pope seized the earth, an earthly throne, and grasped the sword; everything has gone on in the same way since, only they have added to the sword lying, fraud, deceit, fanaticism, superstition, villainy. They have trifled with the most holy, truthful, sincere, fervent feelings of the people; they have bartered it all, all for money, for base earthly power. And isn’t that the teaching of Antichrist? How could Atheism fail to come from them? Atheism has sprung from Roman Catholicism itself. It originated with them themselves. Can they have believed themselves? It has been strengthened by revulsion from them; it is begotten by their lying and their spiritual impotence! Atheism! Among us it is only the exceptional classes who don’t believe, those who, as Yevgeny Pavlovitch splendidly expressed it the other day, have lost their roots. But over there, in Europe, a terrible mass of the people themselves are beginning to lose their faith — at first from darkness and lying, and now from fanaticism and hatred of the church and Christianity.

- Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Real History of Capitalism

Jun 052010
 

Take a look at the history of “trucking and bartering” itself; look at the history of modern capitalism, about which we know a lot. The first thing you’ll notice is, peasants had to be driven by force and violence into a wage-labor system they did not want; then major efforts were undertaken – conscious efforts – to create wants. In fact, if you look back, there’s a whole interesting literature of conscious discussion of the need to manufacture wants in the general population. It’s happened over the whole long stretch of capitalism of course, but one place where you can see it very nicely encapsulated is around the time when slavery was terminated. It’s very dramatic too at cases like these. For example, in 1831 there was a big slave revolt in Jamaica – which was one of the things that led the British to decide to give up slavery in their colonies: after some slave revolts, they basically said, “It’s not paying anymore.” So within a couple of years the British wanted to move from a slave economy to a so-called “free” economy, but they still wanted the basic structure to remain exactly the same – and if you take a look back at the parliamentary debates in England at the time, they were talking very consciously about all this. They were saying: look, we’ve got to keep it the way it is, the masters have to become the owners, the slave have to become the happy workers – somehow we’ve got to work it all out. Well, there was a little problem in Jamaica: since there was a lot of open land there, when the British let the slaves go free they just wanted to move out onto the land and be perfectly happy, they didn’t want to work for the British sugar plantations anymore. So what everyone was asking in Parliament in London was, “How can we force them to keep working for us, even when they’re no longer enslaved into it?” Alright, two things were decided upon: first, they would use state force to close off the open land and prevent people from going and surviving on their own. And secondly, they realized that since all these workers didn’t really want a lot of things – they just wanted to satisfy their basic needs, which they could easily do in that tropical climate – the British capitalists would have to start creating a whole set of wants for them, and make them start desiring things they didn’t then desire, so then the only way they’d be able to satisfy their new material desires would be by working for wages in the British sugar plantations. There was very conscious discussion of the need to create wants – and in fact, extensive efforts were then undertaken to do exactly what they do on T.V. today: to create wants, to make you want the latest pair of sneakers you don’t really need, so then people will be driven into a wage-labor society. And that pattern has been repeated over and over again through the whole entire history of capitalism. In fact, what the whole history of capitalism shows is that people have had to be driven into situations which are then claimed to be their nature. But if the history of capitalism shows anything, it shows it’s not their nature, that they’ve had to be forced into it, and that that effort has had to be maintained right until this day.

Private Institutions and Poverty

Jun 052010
 

So long as power remains privately concentrated, everybody, everybody, has to be committed to one overriding goal: and that’s to make sure that the rich folk are happy — because unless they are, nobody else is going to get anything. So if you’re a homeless person sleeping in the streets of Manhattan, let’s say, your first concern must be that the guys in the mansions are happy — because if they’re happy, then they’ll invest, and the economy will work, and things will function, and then maybe something will trickle down to you somewhere along the line. But if they’re not happy, everything’s going to grind to a halt, and you’re not even going to get anything trickling down.

Why do I feel oppressed?

Jun 052010
 

Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits, in the classic formulation. Now, it has long been understood, very well, that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist, with whatever suffering and injustice that it entails, as long as it is possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource, and that the world is an infinite garbage can. At this stage of history either one of two things is possible. Either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests, guided by values of solidarity, sympathy and concern for others, or alternatively there will be no destiny for anyone to control. As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves. But the conditions of survival, let alone justice, require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole, and by now that means the global community. The question is whether privileged elite should dominate mass communication and should use this power as they tell us they must — namely to impose necessary illusions, to manipulate and deceive the stupid majority and remove them from the public arena. The question in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured; they may well be essential to survival.

Aboriginal Australian proverbs

Jun 052010
 

May as well be here we are as where we are.

Those who lose dreaming are lost.

The more you know, the less you need.

Keep your eyes on the sun and you will not see the shadows.

We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home.

Sigmund Freud Quotes

Jun 032010
 

A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion — in Schiller’s words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. it has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.

One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go.

Where id is, there shall ego be.

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities.

How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.

A person who feels pleasure in producing pain in someone else in a sexual relationship is also capable of enjoying as pleasure any pain which he may himself derive from sexual relations. A sadist is always at the same time a masochist.

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.

At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.

When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any more clearly for doing so.

In some place in my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?

The sexual wishes in regard to the mother become more intense and the father is perceived as an obstacle to the; this gives rise to the Oedipus complex.

If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience that bears witness to the truth, what is one to make of the many people who do not have that experience?

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly repeated rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which it may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but in itself it signifies not a little.

Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.

It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.

Towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state — admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological — in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that “I” and “you” are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.

I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest, but we have not altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery almost before property has given up its primal, anal form; it forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother’s relations to her male child).

Analogies prove nothing, that is quite true, but they can make one feel more at home.

Rollo May Quotes

Jun 032010
 

Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one can temporarily evade reality by avoiding the distasteful situation; but anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries it within.

We define religion as the assumption that life has meaning. Religion, or lack of it, is shown not in some intellectual or verbal formulations but in one’s total orientation to life. Religion is whatever the individual takes to be his ultimate concern. One’s religious attitude is to be found at that point where he has a conviction that there are values in human existence worth living and dying for.

We are more apt to feel depressed by the perpetually smiling individual than the one who is honestly sad. If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.

Therapy isn’t curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness. My purpose as a therapist is to find out what it means to be human. Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, “This is me and the world be damned!” Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society — Socrates, Christ, Freud, all the way down the line.

One does not become fully human painlessly.

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.

It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness.

The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.

Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.

The upshot is that the values and goals which provided a unifying center for previous centuries in the modern period no longer are cogent. We have not yet found the new center which will enable us to choose our goals constructively, and thus to overcome the painful bewilderment and anxiety of not knowing which way to move. Another root of our malady is our loss of the sense of the worth and dignity of the human being. Nietzsche predicted this when he pointed out that the individual was being swallowed up in the herd, and that we were living by a “slave-morality.” Marx also predicted it when he proclaimed that modern man was being “de-humanized,” and Kafka showed in his amazing stories how people literally can lose their identify as persons.

Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism.

The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.

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.

A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born. The insight is then born with anxiety, guilt, and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision.

Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the “divine madness” to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.

When you write a poem, you discover that the very necessity of fitting your meaning into such and such a form requires you to search in your imagination for new meanings. You reject certain ways of saying it; you select others, always trying to form the poem again. In your forming, you arrive at new and more profound meanings than you had even dreamed of. Form is not a mere lopping off of meaning that you don’t have room to put into your poem; it is an aid to finding new meaning, a stimulus to condensing your meaning, to simplifying and purifying it, and to discovering on a more universal dimension the essence you wish to express.

You can live without a father who accepts you, but you cannot live without a world that makes some sense to you.

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also, you will have betrayed your community in failing to make your contribution.

Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. … One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him. This is what our society needs — not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can be, that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves.

Along with the loss of the sense of self has gone a loss of our language for communicating deeply personal meanings to each other. This is one important side of the loneliness now experienced by people in the Western world.

The crucial question which confronts us in psychology and other aspects of the science of man is precisely this chasm between what is abstractly true and what is existentially real for the given living person.

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.

Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.

Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one’s identity as a being of worth and dignity, who is able to affirm his being, if need be, against all other beings and the whole inorganic world.

Freedom is man’s capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.

Man is the “ethical animal” — ethical in potentiality even if, unfortunately, not in actuality. His capacity for ethical judgment — like freedom, reason and the other unique characteristics of the human being — is based upon his consciousness of himself.

It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one’s inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle. Strange as it sounds, steady, patient growth in freedom is probably the most difficult task of all, requiring the greatest courage. Thus if the term “hero” is used in this discussion at all, it must refer not to the special acts of outstanding persons, but to the heroic element potentially in every man.

Now it is no longer a matter of deciding what to do, but of deciding how to decide.

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.

It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love.

A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.

When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.

I have described the human dilemma as the capacity of man to view himself as object and as subject. My point is that both are necessary — necessary for psychological science, for effective therapy, and for meaningful living. I am also proposing that in the dialectical process between these two poles lies the development, and the deepening and widening, of human consciousness. The error on both sides — for which I have used Skinner and the pre-paradox Rogers as examples — is the assumption that one can avoid the dilemma by taking one of its poles. It is not simply that man must learn to live with the paradox — the human being has always lived in this paradox or dilemma, from the time that he first became aware of the fact that he was the one who would die and coined a word for his own death. Illness, limitations of all sorts, and every aspect of our biological state we have indicated are aspects of the deterministic side of the dilemma — man is like the grass of the field, it withereth. The awareness of this, and the acting on this awareness, is the genius of man the subject. But we must also take the implications of this dilemma into our psychological theory. Between the two horns of this dilemma, man has developed symbols, art, language, and the kind of science which is always expanding in its own presuppositions. The courageous living within this dilemma, I believe, is the source of human creativity.

Vanity and narcissism — the compulsive need to be admired and praised — undermine one’s courage, for one then fights on someone else’s conviction rather than one’s own.

In a world where numbers inexorably take over as our means of identification, like flowing lava threatening to suffocate and fosilize all breathing life in its path; in a world where “normality” is defined as keeping your cool; where sex is so available that the only way to preserve any inner center is to have intercourse without committing yourself — in such a schizoid world, which young people experience more directly since they have not had time to build up the defenses which dull the senses of their elders, it is not surprising that will and love have become increasingly problematic and even, as some people believe, impossible of achievement.

Depression is the inability to construct a future.

Care is a state in which something does matter; care is the opposite of apathy. Care is the necessary source of eros, the source of human tenderness.

Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it.

However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.

The function of the rebel is to shake the fixated mores of the rigid order of civilization; and this shaking, though painful, is necessary if the society is to be saved from boredom and apathy. Obviously I do not refer to everyone who calls himself a rebel, but only to the authentic rebel. Civilization gets its first flower from the rebel.

There is no meaningful “yes” unless the individual could also have said “no.”

The authentic rebel knows that the silencing of all his adversaries is the last thing on earth he wishes: their extermination would deprive him and whoever else remains alive from the uniqueness, the originality, and the capacity for insight that these enemies — being human — also have and could share with him. If we wish the death of our enemies, we cannot talk about the community of man. In the losing of the chance for dialogue with our enemies, we are the poorer.

Communication leads to community — that is, to understanding, intimacy, and the mutual valuing that was previously lacking.

Community can be defined simply as a group in which free conversation can take place. Community is where I can share my innermost thoughts, bring out the depths of my own feelings, and know they will be understood.

To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive — to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before.

When I fall in love, I feel more valuable and I treat myself with more care. We have all observed the hesitant adolescent, uncertain of himself, who, when he or she falls in love, suddenly walks with a certain inner assuredness and confidence, a mien which seems to say, “You are looking at somebody now.” … this inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not.

English Proverbs

Jun 022010
 

If you have heard of any more English Proverbs please let me know by contacting me.

A

A bad settlement is better than a good lawsuit.

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.

A bad penny always turns up.

A bellyful is one of meat, drink, or sorrow.

A big tree attracts the woodsman’s axe.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away.

A bad workman blames his tools.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

A burnt child dreads the fire.

A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.

A little pot is easily hot.

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link.

A closed mouth catches no flies.

A constant guest is never welcome.

A fool and his money are soon parted.

A friend in need is a friend indeed.

A good man in an evil society seems the greatest villain of all.

A jack of all trades is master of none.

A loaded wagon makes no noise.

A miss by an inch is a miss by a mile.

A paragraph should be like a lady’s skirt: long enough to cover the essentials but short enough to keep it interesting.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

A rising tide lifts all boats

A stitch in time saves nine.

A thief thinks everyone steals.

A watched pot never boils.

A woman’s work is never done.

A woman is like a cup of tea; you’ll never know how strong she is until she boils.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Act today only, tomorrow is too late

Actions speak louder than words.

Advice most needed is least heeded.

All cats love fish but hate to get their paws wet.

All roads lead to Rome.

All’s well that ends well.

All that glisters is not gold.

ll things come to those who wait.

Always care about your flowers and your friends. Otherwise they’ll fade, and soon your house will be empty.

A man’s home is his castle.

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

An empty vessel makes the most noise.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

As fit as a fiddle.

As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

As soon as a man is born, he begins to die.

Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.

B

Bad news travels fast.

Barking dogs seldom bite.

Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

Before criticizing a man, walk a mile in his shoes.

Beggars can’t be choosers.

Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

Better late than never.

Better safe than sorry.

Birds of a feather flock together.

Bitter pills may have blessed effects.

Blood is thicker than water.

Blood will out.

A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.

Boys will be boys.

Brain is better than brawn.

Buy the best and you only cry once.

C

Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once.

D

A dull pencil is greater than the sharpest memory.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Different strokes for different folks.

Do it today, tomorrow it may be against the law.

Doctors make the worst patients.

Don’t ask God to guide your footsteps if you’re not willing to move your feet.

Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

Don’t burn your bridges.

Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.

Don’t cry over spilled milk.

Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.

Don’t enter your nose in the affairs of others.

Don’t judge a man by the size of his hat, but by the angle of his tilt.

Don’t judge a book by its cover.

Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill.

Don’t put the cart before the horse.

Don’t raise more Demons than you can lay down.

Don’t shut the barn door after the horse is gone.

Don’t take life too seriously; you’ll never get out of it alive.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Don’t let procrastination eat your own clock.

Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight.

E

The early bird catches the worm. But the second mouse gets the cheese.

Even a dog can distinguish between being stumbled over and being kicked.

Every dog has its day.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

Everything good in life is either illegal, immoral, or fattening.

Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die.

Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines

Everything can be justified until it happens to you.

Every rose has its thorn.

F

Failure is the stepping stone for success.

Falling down does not signify failure but staying there does.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Fifty percent of something is better than one hundred percent of nothing.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Forewarned is forearmed.

From those to whom much is given, much is expected.

Fall down seven times, stand up eight.

G

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Give credit where credit is due.

Give a man an inch and he’ll take a yard.

God takes care of drunks.

Great events cast their shadows before them.

Great oaks from little acorns grow.

Green leaves and brown leaves fall from the same tree.

H

Home is where the heart is.

He laughs best who laughs last.

I

I complained I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.

I think, therefore I am.

I came, I saw, I conquered.

It is better to die on one’s feet than live on one’s knees.

If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well.

If it’s too good to be true, then it probably is.

If wishes were fishes, we’d all cast nets.

If you cross your bridges before you come to them, you will have to pay the toll twice.

If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

Ignorance is bliss.

If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

In order to get where you want to go, you first have to leave where you are.

In the mind of thieves the moon is always shining.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

It’s always darkest before the dawn

It never rains, but it pours.

It takes all kinds to make the world go round.

It takes two to tango.

It’s better to be safe than sorry.

It’s not the size of the boat, it’s the motion of the ocean.

If you fall off a cliff, you might as well try to fly. After all, you got nothing to lose.

J

Jack of all trades and master of none.

Justice delayed is justice denied.

K

Knowledge is power.

Kindness, like grain, increase by sowing.

L

Laugh when you’re happy, cry when you’re sad, and do both when you’re the happiest you’ve ever been.

Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.

Learn to walk before you run.

Least said sooner mended.

Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas.

Life is a perception of your own reality.

Lightning never strikes twice in the same place.

Give a man a match, he shall be warm for a moment. Light a man on fire and he shall be warm for the rest of his life.

Long absent, soon forgotten.

Look before you leap.

M

Man is truly himself when he’s alone.

Many things are lost for want of asking.

Money cannot buy happiness.

Money can’t buy everything, but everything needs money

N

Nature, time, and patience are three great physicians.

Never change, for the sake of others. There will be no one like you if you change.

No man can serve two masters.

No money, no justice.

No news is good news.

No pain, no gain.

O

One grain of sand can tip the scale.

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

One murder makes a villain, millions a hero.

One rotten apple will spoil the whole barrel.

Only losers say “Winning isn’t everything.”

Opinions are like assholes: everyone has them and they usually stink.

P

Patience is a virtue.

People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Procrastination is the thief of time.

Proverbs are long life experiences, told in one short sentence.

S

Someone who gossips to you will gossip about you.

Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.

Slow and steady wins the race.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.

Stolen fruit is the sweetest.

Some days you get the bear, other days the bear gets you.

T

The rotten apple injures its neighbors.

That which does not kill you, makes you stronger.

The belly has no ears.

The customer is always right.

The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

The nail that sticks up will be hammered down.

The pen is mightier than the sword.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

The world is your oyster.

There are so many things to say that are better left unsaid.

There’s always a calm before a storm.

There’s no place like home.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Tomorrow is another day.

The worst way to miss someone is to be sitting right beside them knowing you can’t have them.

The more you study, the more you know. The more you know, the more you forget. The more you forget, the less you know. The less you know the more you study.

V

Virtue which parleys is near a surrender.

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.

W

Walk the walk and talk the talk.

Waste not, want not.

What goes up must come down.

What you see is what you get.

What you sow is what you reap.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Women need men like a fish needs a bicycle.

Y

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.

You reap what you sow.