liberatingreality

[liberatingreality]

The most common form of despair is not being who you are.

Søren Kierkegaard

[liberatingreality]

Most people do not actually know how to think for themselves, and unfortunately that prevents them from even knowing it.

Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason

[liberatingreality]

Villainy wears many masks; none so dangerous as the mask of virtue.

Washington Irving, Sleepy Hollow

[liberatingreality]

To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to themselves. They have to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

[liberatingreality]

You can never be free of their criticism until you no longer seek their praise.

Dennis Ruane

[liberatingreality]

Luxuries tend to become necessities and spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it.

We have invented countless time-saving machines that are supposed to make life more relaxed - washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, telephones, mobile phones, computers, email. We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated.

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

[liberatingreality]

People will always prefer black-and-white over shades of grey, and so there will always be the temptation to hold overly-simplified beliefs and to hold them with excessive confidence.

Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

[liberatingreality]

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.

Carl Jung, address to the Society for Psychical Research in England

[liberatingreality]

You do many things at once; you read, listen to the radio, talk, smoke, eat, drink. You are the consumer with the open mouth, eager and ready to swallow everything—pictures, liquor, knowledge. This lack of concentration is clearly shown in our difficulty in being alone with ourselves. To sit still, without talking, smoking, reading, drinking, is impossible for most people. They become nervous and fidgety, and must do something with their mouth or their hands.

Erich Fromm, The Art of Living

[liberatingreality]

The expectations of others often become self-fulfilling prophecies. Without realizing it, we often behave in ways that confirm the beliefs others have about us. Those subjective beliefs create new realities for us. We often become who other people think we are, in their eyes and in our behavior.

Philip G. Zimbardo, Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

[liberatingreality]

I suppose it’s no surprise that we feel the need to dehumanize the people we hurt—before, during, or after the hurting occurs. But it always comes as a surprise. In psychology it’s known as cognitive dissonance. It’s the idea that it feels stressful and painful for us to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time (like the idea that we’re kind people and the idea that we’ve just destroyed someone). And so, to ease the pain, we create illusory ways to justify our contradictory behavior.

Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publically Shamed

[liberatingreality]

I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.

Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

[liberatingreality]

If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.

Carl Sagan

[liberatingreality]

For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.

Cynthia Occelli

[liberatingreality]

Why do people have mid-life crises? It’s because they don’t know who they are. And suddenly they realize time is running out. They have to fight to be authentic, to be REAL. All the time, people are having breakdowns brought on by identity crises. They have lived their lives in bad faith. They have been fakes and phonies, frauds and impostors. They have impersonated human beings rather than actually BEING human beings. They have spent their whole lives in a state of alienation from themselves.

Adam Weishaupt

[liberatingreality]

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

Carl Jung

[liberatingreality]

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where rich food and wine were in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden