Category: Quotations

A third barrier to the full knowing of another lies not in the one who shares but in the other, the knower, who must reverse the sharer's sequence and translate it back into image – the script the mind can read. It is wildly improbable that the receiver's image will match the sender's original mental image.

Translation error is compounded by bias error. We distort others by forcing into them our own preferred ideas and gestalts, a process Proust beautifully describes:

We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognize and to which we listen.

Quoted from the book Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy by Irvin Yalom.

Great artists attempt to communicate image directly through suggestion, through metaphor, through linguistic feats intended to evoke some similar image to the reader. But ultimately they realize the inadequacy of their tools for the task. Listen to Flaubert's lament, in Madame Bovary:

Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

Quoted from the book Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy by Irvin Yalom.

There is nothing wrong in your life,
there never has been.
Your whole life is teaching you
who you are.
Your whole life is awakening you
to the truth of who you are.

- Samarpan

"The road to the Western Lands is by definition the most dangerous road in the world, for it is a journey beyond Death, beyond the basic God standard of Fear and Danger. It is the most heavily guarded road in the world, for it gives access to the gift that supersedes all other gifts: Immortality. Every man starts the course. One in a million finishes."

William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands.

"Door langzaam en vastberaden te zijn, maak je juist meer kans om de race te winnen."

- Susan M. Drake, Freelancen voor Dummies.

[By being slow and determined, you increase your chances at winning the race.]

"For it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of death and hardship."

- Epictetus.

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."

- Albert Camus

Here is the famous quote that my French grand-mère used to make quite often, so often in fact that it has been carried on down to me via my French mother.

"Moins on en dit, mieux ça vaut." -- Grand-mère Beaucourt.

Is there anyone out there who can translate it for us?

"Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life."

- Origin unknown.

"In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else. We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines only in terms of other words. I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it's related to, and how it's related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything. There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected."

- Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web), Weaving the Web.

"The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves."

- Carl Gustav Jung.

Note: according to Jung, it is essential that one first get in touch with the Shadow (and then next with the Anima/Animus) before one can truly get in touch with the inner self. Otherwise, things seemingly outside of our control are bound to get the worst of us by the inevitable conflicts of fate.

"I wanna tell you something Mark, something you do not yet know, that we K-PAXians have been around long enough to have discovered. The universe will expand, then it will collapse back on itself, then will expand again. It will repeat this process forever. What you don't you know is that when the universe expands again, everything will be as it is now. Whatever mistakes you make this time around, you will live through on your next pass. Every mistake you make, you will live through again, & again, forever. So my advice to you is to get it right this time around. Because this time is all you have."

- Prot (from the file K-PAX).

"It's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once...and it's too much. My heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst. And then I remember... to relax, and not try to hold on to it. And then it flows through me like rain. And I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life. You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure. Don't worry...you will someday. "

- Lester Burnham (from the film American Beauty)

"Conducting is when you draw designs in the nowhere -- with your stick, or with your hands -- which are interpreted as instructional messages by guys wearing bow ties who wish they were fishing."

- Frank Zappa

Alright, here's a trivia quiz for all you fine readers of my blog out there in the real world. Please read the following quotation carefully and give it a good think:

You reckon ill who leave me out
When me you fly I am the wings.

The million dollar question is: who wrote it and where does it come from? For those interested in making some good old extra bonus points, give me a good interpretation. Good luck.

"A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Even seemingly trivial things often have roots in deep emotional experiences. To deal only with the superficial trivia without seeing the deeper, more tender issues is to trample on the sacred ground of another's heart."

- Stephen R. Covey

"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."

- Gertrude Stein.

Especially nowadays in the Age of the Computer there is so much information out there that it is impossible to collate even a tiny fraction of the infinite bits and bytes without straining one's sanity to the extreme. Lose their common sense, poor folks. Personally, I like many others out there suffer a slight form of infatuation, addiction if you will, enamored with the unknown crooks and crannies of information to-be-discovered. What it has to offer. Wherever that may be. One link leads you on to the other link, on to the other link, and so forth ad infinitum. Where to stop, that is the question.

"Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness."

- Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1670), No. 414.

This is an interesting quotation because it implies that there is no such thing as pure sanity. Nor is there such a form of madness some mixture some ever slight delusion of ours which more than likely has something to do with madness. Whatever that may be. At a very very early age I quickly concluded that if I thought I was crazy then that was proof that I wasn't insane at all. Hey, I guess that I am not crazy. I am not crazy. Whatever pure craziness really is. How many people do you know around you who walk from day to day pretending that they are perfectly normal? One, two, three, four hundred. They would never admit they were crazy would they? My conclusion now rests, to be contemplated by others. So true even after all these centuries. Man has not changed that much at all.

"It is through the world and ultimately through you that the Unmanifested knows itself. You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold. That is how important you are!"

- Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now.

"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream by night."

- Edgar Allan Poe, Eleanora, 1842.

"Once upon a time, I, Chuang-tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, flittering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly...suddenly I awoke... Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man."

- Chuang-tzu, Chinese philosopher

"Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you."

- Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961).