"What we can do is to live out our lives as best we can with purpose, and with love, and with joy. We can use each day to show those who are closest to us how much we care about them, and treat others with the kindness and respect that we wish for ourselves. We can learn from our mistakes and grow from our failures. And we can strive at all costs to make a better world, so that someday, if we are blessed with the chance to look back on our time here, we can know that we spent it well; that we made a difference; that our fleeting presence had a lasting impact on the lives of others."
Barack Obama

"We are not mad, we are human, we want to love, and someone must forgive us for the paths we take to love, for the paths are many and dark, and we are ardent and cruel in our journey."
Leonard Cohen

"If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not a poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place. "
Rainer Maria Rilke

"It is not true that money can't buy happiness. It can, that's the good news. The bad news is that it's someone else's happiness."
Nick Hornby

"Happiness cannot be pursued. You do not find happiness; happiness finds you. It is not an end in itself, but a by-product of other activities, often arriving when it is least expected."
Mick Brown

"What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do."
Bob Dylan

"Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die."
Cindy Clabough

"Anything can happen in life, especially nothing."
Michel Houellebecq

"Because grandiosity is the counterpart of depression within the narcissistic disturbance, the achievement of freedom from both forms of disturbance is hardly possible without deeply felt mourning about the situation of the former child. This ability to grieve - that is, to give up the illusion of his “happy” childhood, to feel and recognize the full extent of the hurt he has endured - can restore the depressive’s vitality and creativity and free the grandiose person from the exertions of and dependence on the Sisyphean task. If a person is able, during this long process, to experience the reality that he was never loved as a child for what he was but was instead needed and exploited for his achievements, success, and good qualities - and that he sacrificied his childhood for this form of love - he will be very deeply shaken, but one day he will feel the desire to end these efforts. He will discover in himself a need to live according to his true self and no longer be forced to earn “love” that always leaves him empty-handed, since it is given to his false self - something he has begun to identify and relinquish."
Alice Miller, "Drama of the Gifted Child"

"If the parents cannot act in an adequately empathetic manner, that is, cannot accurately mirror the child and encourage him to exhibit and be proud, or allow the child to idealize and merge with them, certain consequences characteristically emerge. The child will begin to manifest symptoms that indicate that the self is not maintaining an adequate amount of cohesion, self-regulation, or self-esteem. For instance, the child’s poorly formed sense of self may cause the child to become fragmented, behave erratically, and feel debilitated by shame, unbearable emptiness, or self-hatred. As a result the child will manifest “disintegration products” such as anxiety, rage, or sexual preoccupations. The child will then begin to try to solve the problem by finding others to soothe him or by trying to soothe himself. The child might try to find someone to mirror him, by extravagantly showing off; he might blindly idealize someone and try to psychologically merge with their wisdom or strength; he might try to soothe himself by becoming grandiose, thereby convincing himself that he is all powerful and cannot be affected by others; he might try to revitalize himself by overstimulation, seeking some sort of sexual fetish or physical intensity."
Philip Cushman, "Constructing the Self, Constructing America"

"Were therapists required by “truth in advertising” legislation to tell their reality, then virtually no on would enter therapy. The therapist would be obliged to say at least three things in return to the suffering supplicant:
First, you will have to deal with this core issue the rest of your life, and at best you will manage to win a few skirmishes in your long uncivil war with yourself. Decades from now you will be fighting on these familiar fronts, though the terrain may have shifted so much that you may have difficulty recognizing the same old, same old.  Second, you will be obliged to disassemble the many forces you have gathered to defend against your wound. At this late date it is your defenses, not your wound, that cause the problem and arrest your journey. But removing those defenses will oblige you to feel all the pain of that wound again.
And third, you will not be spared pain, vouchsafed wisdom or granted exemption from future suffering. In fact, genuine disclosure would require a therapist to reveal the shabby sham of managed care as a fraud, and make a much more modest claim for long-term depth therapy or analysis.  Yet, however modest that claim, it is I believe, true. Therapy will not heal you, make your problems go away or make your life work out. It will, quite simply, make your life more interesting."
James Hollis, "Creating a Life"

"The achievements of the first George W. Bush term included huge corporate profits while wages stagnated or declined, along with huge tax cuts for the rich to redistribute wealth even further upward than before. These were among the many policies benefiting a tiny minority and likely to create a long-term “fiscal train wreck” that will undermine future social spending and transfer to future generations the costs of today’s plunder by the very rich."
Noam Chomsky, “Failed States”

"It’s hard to imagine a more purposeless activity than American-style high school in our time… high school in our times amounts to little more than day care for virtual adults in which some learning might incidentally take place, much of it of dubious value."
James Howard Kunstler, “The Long Emergency”

"It is terrible to die of thirst in the ocean. Do you have to salt your truth so heavily that it does not even quench thirst any more?"
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil”

"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not."
Andre Gide

"To follow the path of wisdom has never been more urgent or more difficult. Our society is dedicated almost entirely to the celebration of ego, with all its sad fantasies about success and power, and it celebrates those very forces of greed and ignorance that are destroying the planet. It has never been more difficult to hear the unflattering voice of the truth, and never more difficult, once having heard it, to follow it."
Sogyal Rimpoche

"Liberated from the superstitions of the past, he doubts even his own anxiety… Even though his sexual attitudes are permissive rather than puritanical, he gets no lasting pleasure from them. Acquisitive in the sense that his cravings have no limits… he demands immediate gratification and lives in a state of restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire."
Christopher Lasch, "The Culture of Narcissism"

"Cultural myths and social ideals tell us what we can expect from our lives, what lifestyles or possessions we should value and seek to attain. When our lives do not conform to these images we tend to question the worth of our own experiences rather than the validity of the expectations.  Nowhere in our lives do myths operate more powerfully than in our intimate relationships. Romantic Love is the predominant myth of personal love in the Western world. The myth tells us that there is one perfect person out there for each of us. A woman waits for her true love, the "armored knight" who will "sweep her off her feet." A man attains his true love through searching for and, presumably, "sweeping away" the perfect woman. Innocent and idealistic as it seems, the myth of Romantic Love actually perpetuates within us a damaging set of emotions and expectations. Romantic Love teaches a woman that her worth comes from being sexually desired and emotionally needed. At the same time she may lose sight of her own identity when she becomes involved with a man. When she takes his name in marriage, she becomes, traditionally, an appendage to his life and identity. There is always an element of self-sacrifice involved: according to the myth, once a woman truly loves a man his faults and even his abuses become tolerable. Her faithful acceptance of suffering and pain are considered to be proof of her love.  While the key to Romantic Love for a woman is being needed by a man, for the man it centers around the depth of his need: the greater a man’s emotional and sexual hunger, the truer is his love. Because Romantic Love is supposed to be uncontrollable and irrational, jealousy and anger seem to be natural expressions of passion as well. Romantic Love teaches a man that he must identify a perfect woman, then conquer or possess her in order to satisfy his need."
Judith Pintar, "Halved Souls"

"We are the ones we have been waiting for. "
Alice Walker