To live is to suffer.
–The Buddha
But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, there must be a in meaning in suffering. … Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
— Viktor Emil Frankl
Man’s Search for Meaning
One always finds one’s burden again. … The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
–Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus
Life is mainly froth and bubble.
Two things stand like stone:
Kindness in another’s trouble.
Courage in your own.
See also on this blog, Be Kind.
One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.
—Abraham Maslow, psychologist
See also The Way of Transformation on this blog.
To be totally engaged with all my functions, all my faculties, all my capacities in life.
To me that would be success.
–Philosopher Jacob Needleman in
Money And The Meaning Of Life
Fast Company
See also on this blog, Thoroughly Used Up When I Die
[Philosopher Hannah] Arendt concluded that evil in the modern world is done neither by monsters nor by bureaucrats, but by joiners.
That evil, Arendt argued, originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. It is the meaning [Adolf] Eichmann finds as part of the Nazi movement that leads him to do anything and sacrifice everything. Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement. It is futile to reason with them. They inhabit an echo chamber, having no interest in learning what others believe. It is this thoughtless commitment that permits idealists to imagine themselves as heroes and makes them willing to employ technological implements of violence in the name of saving the world.
–Professor Roger Berkowitz
Misreading ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’
New York Times
See also my blog post on the MCI Worldcom fraud, Integrity Ebbs by Inches
Because it is possible to create [one’s self,] 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.
–Rollo May in The Meaning of Anxiety
via Kierkegaard on Anxiety and Creativity | Brain Pickings.
What a wonderful power the machine gives you but, is it going to dominate you? The statement of what the need and want is must come from you not from the machine. Not from the government that’s teaching you or not even from the clergy, it has to come from one’s own inside and the minute that you let that drop and take what the dictation (dictator) of the time is instead of the dictation of your own eternity is you have capitulated to the devil and you are in hell.
–Joseph Campbell
The Hero’s Journey
Theory
Whether you can
observe a thing
depends upon the
theory you are using.
–Albert Einstein
Cheerful Giver
The point is this: the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.
Each of you must give as you have made up your mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.
And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work.
–II Corinthians 9:6-8
Shut Me Out
They drew a circle that shut me out
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win;
We drew a circle that took them in.–Edwin Markham
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