I stopped in the middle of that building and I saw the sky. I saw the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and time, time to sit and smoke. And I looked at the pen and said to myself, what the hell am I grabbing this for?
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It is no more possible to make life easy than it is to grow a herb of immortality.
Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition
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Put up with being laughed at on occasion; look around you, and give yourself a good shaking to find out who you really are.
Who are these people whose admiration you seek? Aren’t they the ones you are used to describing as mad? Well, then, is that what you want – to be admired by lunatics?
Epictetus, Discourses
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The world is full of people who are waiting to be pushed, boosted, helped, but they will never be anything but weaklings. If they do succeed through pull or influence in getting the place they long for, they will not have the ability to hold it.
“Our expectation that satisfying intimate relationships should, ideally, provide happiness and that, if they do not, there must be something wrong with those relationships, seems to be exaggerated. . .
“Do not die of another person’s misery.” -Baltasar Gracián
“. . .it is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty to their highest limit.”
BY MATTHEW ARNOLD
Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,
Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!
I feel a nameless sadness o’er me roll.
…is a desire for what one dreads, a sympathetic antipathy. Anxiety is an alien power which lays hold of an individual, and yet one cannot tear oneself away, nor has a will to do so; for one fears, but what one fears one desires. Anxiety then makes the individual impotent.
Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
The rejection of freedom does not leave a man unpunished. It turns him into a slave of necessity.
Victor Gorskii
Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for a man to bear, something he tries to escape from?
Grey Brick Road 