#p

Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon's hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly - once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation. ↗

— Toni Morrison

#prize #speech #experience

You're telling me that because of the Internet, and the availability of every experience, every whim, every tool, sudden everyone's an artist? But here's the thing: if everyone's an artist, then no one is. ↗

— Meg Wolitzer

#no-one #experience

To understand the immeasurable, the mind must be extraordinarily quiet, still. ↗

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

#mind #peace #meditation

You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say. ↗

— Marcus Aurelius

#incarnation #mind-over-body #soul #meditation

When Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' we see the origin of every Jewish shrug from Spinoza to Woody Allen. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#irony #judaism #maimonides #messiah #woody-allen

Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity. ↗

— Voltaire

#consciousness #dissolution #eternal #infinity #knowing

When I focus on the way "men" or "husbands" generally behave, I start to lump Jamie along with half of humanity. I find myself feeling angry or annoyed with Jamie for things he hasn't even done. ↗

— Gretchen Rubin

#marriage #experience

Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by. They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. [...] A human being may well ask an animal: 'Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?' The animal would like to answer, and say, 'The reason is I always forget what I was going to say' - but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#melancholy

As adults, we hvae many inhibitions against crying. We feel it is an expression of weakness, or femininity or of childishness. The person who is afraid to cry is afraid of pleasure. This is because the person who is afraid to cry holds himself together rigidly so that he won't cry; that is, the rigid person is as afraid of pleasure as he is afraid to cry. In a situation of pleasure he will become anxious. As his tensions relax he will begin to tremble and shake, and he will attempt to control this trembling so as not to break down in tears. His anxiety is nothing more than the conflict between his desire to let go and his fear of letting go. This conflict will arise whenever the pleasure is strong enough to threaten his rigidity. Since rigidity develops as a means to block out painful sensations, the release of rigidity or the restoration of the natural motility of the body will bring these painful sensations to the fore. Somewhere in his unconscious the neurotic individual is aware that pleasure can evoke the repressed ghosts of the past. It could be that such a situation is responsible for the adage "No pleasure without pain. ↗

— Alexander Lowen

#crying #emotions #feelings #letting-go #psychoanalysis

Insecurities have the ability to shape and mold our minds to live with everything that’s bad; like crying on the inside, while smiling on the outside…thus creating pain…but, alas, I have the answer; forget about what you thought and enjoy (embrace) what you feel ↗

— Jeremy Aldana

#emotion #feeling #happiness #insecurity #pain