#mind

Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same process) — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself. Hence refusal to actualize one’s possibilities brings guilt toward one’s self. But creating also means destroying the status quo of one’s environment, breaking the old forms; it means producing something new and original in human relations as well as in cultural forms (e.g., the creativity of the artist). Thus every experience of creativity has its potentiality of aggression or denial toward other persons in one’s environment or established patterns within one’s self. To put the matter figuratively, in every experience of creativity something in the past is killed that something new in the present may be born. Hence, for Kierkegaard, guilt feeling is always a concomitant of anxiety: both are aspects of experiencing and actualizing possibility. The more creative the person, he held, the more anxiety and guilt are potentially present. ↗

— Rollo May

#creativity #mindset #experience

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. ↗

— Carl Jung

#mind #nonsense #pendulum #right #right and wrong

There exists, if I am not mistaken, an entire world which is the totality of mathematical truths, to which we have access only with our mind, just as a world of physical reality exists, the one like the other independent of ourselves, both of divine creation. ↗

— Charles Hermite

#am #both #creation #divine #entire

This means that the mind or spirit is present anywhere, because it is nowhere attached to any particular place. And it can remain present because, even when related to this or that object, it does not cling to it by reflection and thus lose its original mobility. ↗

— Eugen Herrigel

#anywhere #attached #because #cling #does

I don't mind what the market is, but why is it vapid? If they're such a bunch of idiots, why don't you show them good music instead? They're not going to know the difference. ↗

— Kristin Hersh

#difference #going #good #good music #i

It is not possible either to trick or escape the mind of Zeus. ↗

— Hesiod

#escape #mind #possible #trick #zeus

He who seeks for methods without having a definite problem in mind seeks in the most part in vain. ↗

— David Hilbert

#having #methods #mind #most #part

Memorial Day this year is especially important as we are reminded almost daily of the great sacrifices that the men and women of the Armed Services make to defend our way of life. ↗

— Robin Hayes

#almost #armed #armed services #daily #day

As fire kindled by fire, so is the poet's mind kindled by contact with a brother poet. ↗

— John Keble

#contact #fire #kindled #mind #poet

The thing I hate most in acting is asking permission to do things. What you really want to do is say, 'This is my need; this is what's going to get me further; this is what's going to be alive. I don't ever say, 'Do you mind if...?' I just come in and do it. ↗

— Lance Henriksen

#alive #asking #come #ever #further