Adventures of ideas: 80 Mind-Blowing Insights from Cool Minds
Welcome, adventurer! Enjoy!
The aim of this article is to Move your mind. Maybe to lose it for a while. It is rock n roll! It’s a list for seekers of ideas and meaning but mostly for those who like to play. Don’t take it too seriously or you might suffer seriously. This is a playful exploration of words and ideas.
"Philosophy is the product of wonder."
—Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (1933)
“Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possiblities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what the may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familar things in an unfamilar aspect.”
–Bertrand Russell
An Ethereal Tip on How to approach this list
“My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.
— Terence McKenna
Let’s go! Immerse yourself in Ideas and Enjoy! What else are you gonna do?
"The educated person is one who thinks for herself, not one who follows blindly in the footsteps of others."
—Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 360 – 415 CE)
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."A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth."
—Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays (1929).
.“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”― Richard P. Feynman
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.My problem as a writer, using words, is to dispel the illusions of language while employing one of the languages that generates them." — Alan Watts
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.“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
— Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (1988)
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."For the truth is not in the names, but in the things themselves; and one must investigate how each of them truly is, without looking solely at the names."
—Plato, (Cratylus)
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.“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” Søren Kierkegaard
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.“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
―Aristotle, Metaphysics
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.“The work of art does not aim to convey something else, just itself”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.Only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life. Non-ambiguity and non-contradiction are one-sided and thus unsuited to express the incomprehensible. —Carl Jung
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.“A truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.”
—William Blake
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.“People don't have ideas. Ideas have people.”
—Carl Jung
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.“You are under no obligation to be the person you were five seconds ago.”
— Alan Watts
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.“What is to give light must endure burning.”
—Viktor Frankl.
.“Magic doesn't sweep you away; it gathers you up into the body of the present moment so thoroughly that all your explanations fall away: the ordinary, in all its plain and simple outrageousness, begins to shine -- to become luminously, impossibly so. Every facet of the world is awake, and you within it.”
— David Abram
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."The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives." Albert Einstein (1954)
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."Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smooths there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work." —Plotinus, (Enneads I.6.9)
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.To understand “the absence of self”, you have to meditate. If you only intellectualize, your head will explode. — Ajahn Chah
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.“Know how to listen, and you will profit even from those who talk badly.”
—Plutarch
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."Do not repeat after me words that you do not understand. Do not merely put on a mask of my ideas, for it will be an illusion and you will thereby deceive yourself."
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
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.Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.
—Bertrand Russell,The Conquest of Happiness (1930)
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.“Some understanding of Tantra is, therefore, a marvellous and welcome corrective to certain excesses of Western civilization. We over accentuate the positive, think of the negative as “bad”, and thus live in frantic terror of death and extinction which renders us incapable of “playing” life with an air of noble and joyous detachment. Failing to understand the musical quality of nature, which fulfills itself as an eternal present, we live for a tomorrow that never comes — like an orchestra racing to attain the finale of the symphony. But, through understanding the creative power of the female, of the negative, of empty space, and of death, we may at least become completely alive in the present” —Alan Watts, “Nature, Man and Woman” (1958)
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."That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show."
—Ada Lovelace,"Sketch of the Analytical Engine" (1843)
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."The opposite of a fact is a falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth." —Niels Bohr
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.“When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence. How can you love if you are not there? The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975)
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."When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images."
— In "The Philosophy of Niels Bohr" (1963)
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."The painter is lord of all things that man can know, for he can create in his works the same diversity of things as are made by Nature—animals, plants, landscapes, mountains, plains, seas, and so on. In truth, he is a second god."
—Leonardo Da Vinci (early 16th century).
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.Everything is alive. What we call dead is an abstraction—David Bohm
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.“Individuation is not that you become an ego—you would then become an individualist. You know, an individualist is a man who did not succeed in individuating; he is a philosophically distilled egotist.”
— Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga
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.Where does a thought go when it is forgotten?
— Carl Jung
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.Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
— Albert Camus
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."There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil."
—Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues, (1954)The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can't be organized or regulated. It isn't true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.“ —Ram Dass
“I have often thought it would be a blessing if each human being were stricken blind and deaf for a few days at some time during his early adult life. Darkness would make him more appreciative of sight; silence would teach him the joys of sound. “Now and then I have tested my seeing friends to discover what they see. —Helen Keller
“Let everything that's been planned come true. Let them believe. And let them have a laugh at their passions. Because what they call passion actually is not some emotional energy, but just the friction between their souls and the outside world. And most important, let them believe in themselves. Let them be helpless like children, because weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win ―Andrei Tarkovsky (Stalker movie) , (1979)
"One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world."
—Malala Yousafzai , I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, (2013)"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible."— Bertrand Russell
“Writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question, they preserve a solemn silence.”
—Plato , Phaedrus"A mythological order is a system of images that gives consciousness a sense of meaning in existence, which, my dear friend, has no meaning––it simply is. But the mind goes asking for meanings; it can’t play unless it knows (or makes up) the rules. Mythologies present games to play: how to make believe you’re doing thus and so. Ultimately, through the game, you experience that positive thing which is the experience of being-in-being, of living meaningfully. That’s the first function of mythology, to evoke in the individual a sense of grateful affirmative awe before the monstrous mystery that is existence."
— Joseph Campbell"Evidently it is not science that has diminished man or divorced him from divinity. On the contrary... we are to recognize in this whole universe a reflection magnified of our own most inward nature; so that we are indeed its ears, its eyes, its thinking, and its speech – or, in theological terms, God's ears, God's eyes, God's thinking, and God's Word; and, by the same token, participants here and now in an act of creation that is continuous in the whole infinitude of that space of our mind through which the planets fly, and our fellows of earth now among them." —Joseph Campbell
“Most human beings are living their whole lives from the pairs of opposites because it’s the only way they know. But when you discover that there is within you this place that is beyond the pairs of opposites, and that place, that state of awareness, is actually what you are, you start to realize you can live from that place.”
― Adyashanti“The total number of minds in the universe is one.
—Erwin Schrödinger“"All of creation is a song of joy, and to know it is to feel and hear the harmony of the universe."
—Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179)If ignorance is bliss, why aren't more people happy? — Thomas Jefferson
"The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."
— Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, (1983)"Now, what is the real world? Some people have the theory that the real world is material or physical. They say it’s made of a kind of stuff. Other people have the theory that the real world is spiritual or mental. But I want to point out that both those theories of the world are concepts. They are constructions of words. And the real world is not an idea, it is not words." —Alan Watts
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. —Albert Camus
Beware of Destination Addiction—a preoccupation with the idea that happiness is in the next place, the next job, or with the next partner. Until you give up the idea that happiness is somewhere else, it will never be where you are. —Robert Holden
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ― Albert Einstein
"There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy"
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1883)“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”
— Dr. SeussConversations that were held and books that were read long ago become so much a part of the stream of one’s own thinking that it is impossible, sometimes, to say which ideas are one’s own and which are borrowed. - Alan Watts
What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
— Plutarch“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”
—Plutarch, Parallel Lives, 75–120 AD
“In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.”― Jiddu Krishnamurti
“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together... We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”
—Max Plank, speech in Florence, 1944“Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.”
—Joseph Campbell (1988)“The individual who is not conscious of his own shadow is often susceptible to being possessed by it. One becomes the other if the other is not integrated.”
— Carl Jung. Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self” (1951)“All that we are is the result of what we have thought.”
— BuddhaMost people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking—and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority.
—Erich Fromm, The Art of Being (1976)“Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.”
― Erich Fromm, the art of loving , (1956)
“It makes no difference to a man’s health how long he works so long as he loves his work, for his affection is like the oil in the lamp which keeps the wick burning without consuming the wick itself. When the oil is gone, then it is that the wick goes fast. If at any moment I lost my eagerness and enthusiasm, then very likely I would go to pieces.
—Nikola Tesla“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958)There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and you finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born, to the moment you die, is a process of learning
"Such widespread phenomena as depression, aggression, and addiction are not understandable unless we recognize the existential vacuum underlying them."
— Victor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946“To be secure means to isolate and fortify the “I”, but it is just the feeling of being an isolated “I” which makes me feel lonely and afraid. The more security I can get, the more I shall want”. To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath.”
— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity.Unfortunately, there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.”― Carl Jung
"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. As a man is so he sees." — William Blake
“Finally, I said that I couldn’t see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything.”—Richard P. Feynman
One who looks outside, dreams. One who looks inside awakens."― C. G. Jung
“Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.”― Aldous Huxley
We extract the poetry from being by the assumption of the mundane.—Terence McKenna
An unhealthy mind, even in a healthy body, will ultimately destroy health — Manly P. hall
Unexpressed emotion will never die. They are buried alive and they will come forth later in uglier ways. — Sigmund Freud
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Enough is abundance to the wise.” — Some Stoic or something
The best way to serve the audience is to ingore them —Rick Rubin
The only consistent people are the dead —Aldux Huxley
“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”—Henry David Thoreau
"Most of the world is like a mental hospital. Some persons are sick with jealousy, others with anger, hatred, and passion. They are victims of their habits and emotions. But you can make your home a place of peace." —Paramahansa Yogananda
The secret to happiness is freedom, and the secret to freedom is courage —Thucydides
" To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it."—Osho
"People are more easily deceived when they do not suspect deception."
—Aristotle (Organon)
"Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner."
—Lao TzuThat’s why gurus of all types tell you to know yourself, to look within, to find out who you really are because the harder you look, the less you will find, and then you’ll realize it was never there in the first place. There isn’t a separate you. Your mind is what there is. It’s everything. But the only way to find that out is to delve into the state of delusion as hard as possible. Okay, maybe it isn’t the only way. But it’s one way. Almost all spiritual disciplines — meditations, prayers, and so on — are ways of persisting in folly. They’re methods of resolutely and consistently doing what you’re already doing.
—Alan Watts"I never let schooling interfere with my education."
—Mark TwainWhat is intellectually respectable is often a matter of academic fashion —Alan Watts
“All our thinking is the result of our conditioning, it comes from our accumulated experiences, memories, fears, hopes. Such a mind is not free.—Jiddu Krishnamurti
He who binds to himself a joy does the winged life destroy, but he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in eternity’s sunrise — William Blake
He that would perfect himself in any art whatsoever, let him betake himself to the reading of a sure and certain book upon his art many times over: for to read many books upon your art produces confusion rather than learning —Quintilian, a Roman rhetorician from the 1st century AD.
"Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed." — Terence McKenna
There is no self to understand but only the thought that creates the self. — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“It is quite possible that we look at the world from the wrong side and that we might find the right answer by changing our point of view and looking at it from the other side, that is, not from outside, but from inside.”— Carl Jung
“When you like a flower, you just pluck it. But when you love a flower, you water it daily.” ―Gautama Buddha
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished
"Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its own tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else. Your own body will be food for something else. Anyone who denies this, anyone who holds back, is out of order. Death is an act of giving."— Joseph Campbell
We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we're in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back from the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see it's like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that...Also, watch the flow of music. The melody as its expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence...you wait till later to find out what the sentence means...The present is always changing the past. —Alan Watts
“Let go completely, at the deepest, most primal and fundamental level—there is no “how” other than that. Dive deep enough within, and there it will be. The letting go will happen, and there will be no way back. All will be well, and better than can be imagined. Nothing will have changed, except everything.” ― Adyashanti
The greatest guru is helpless as long as the disciple is not eager to learn. —Zen Saying
An unhealthy mind, even in a healthy body, will ultimately destroy health — Manly P. hall
“You don't realize that the Other is also inside you. You think it's somehow from the outside and you think you can see it even in your neighbor's opinions and actions that repulse you. There you fight it, being completely blinded. Anyone who accepts the other that comes to him, because he is also present in him, doesn't struggle anymore, but looks inside himself and keeps silent.”
― Carl Jung"If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things that you don't like doing to go on living. That is to go on doing things that you don't like doing, which is stupid" — Alan Watts
"Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true." ― Adyashanti
“To be detached from the world, (in the sense that Buddhist and Taoists and Hindus often talk about detachment), does not mean to be non-participative. By that, I don't mean that you just go through doing everything mechanically and have your thoughts elsewhere. I mean complete participation but still detached. To have it, to have life, and to have its pleasure, you must at the same time let go of it.” —Alan Watts
Listening to the Logos rather than to me, it is wise to agree that in reality all things are one thing and one thing only
—Heraclitus"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness." —Max Planck
“Our greatest treasure is that which is hidden deep within our own subconscious, is that dark unused part of our self that is in fact light that is unconscious of itself.”
― Carl Jung“Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.”
— Bertrand Russel“To dwell in the here and now does not mean you never think about the past, or responsibly plan for the future. The idea is simply not to allow yourself to get lost in regrets about the past or worries about the future. Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness.”― Thich Nhat Hanh
. Work as we know it is contaminated with the fear of death, for work is what must be done in order to survive, and to survive, to go on, is the ultimate and irreducible necessity. Why is it not obvious that to make survival necessary is to make it a burden? Life is above all a spontaneous process, and, as we have seen, to command spontaneity, to say that one must live, is the basic contradiction imposing the double-bind on us all. —Alan Watts
To a wise and good man, the whole earth is his fatherland—Democritus 460–370 BCE
It is not events that disturb people, it is their judgments concerning them. Death, for example, is nothing frightening, otherwise, it would have frightened Socrates. But the judgment that death is frightening – now, that is something to be afraid of.— Epictetus
“Great acts are made up of small deeds.” — Lao Tzu
Because; the moment I am aware that I am aware, I am not aware. Awareness means the observer is not. — Jiddu krishnamurti
And so I tell you, keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives. Everyone who seeks, finds. And to everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. —Jesus Christ
The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can't be organized or regulated. It isn't true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.“ —Ram Dass
Being properly mature involves a frank, unfrightened relationship with one's own darkness, complexity and ambition. It involves accepting that not everything that makes us happy will please others or be honored as especially 'nice', but it can be important to explore and hold on to it nevertheless.
—Alain de Botton"What is it we are questing for? It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. There is nothing you can do that’s more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way you will find, live, become a realization of your own personal myth.
—Joseph Campbell“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” —Mark Twain
“If you escape from the battle, you have not understood the battle. The battle is you.”― Jiddu Krishnamurti
"You should not learn my way but your own. My way leads to me and not to you."—Carl Jung
