Quotes by British Authors - Page 525

In childhood we inhabit a world of wonderful contrasts that later we often come to see as bizarre and do our best to rearrange, with everything in its 'proper' place. Unusual juxtapositions we label surrealistic. Yet what is surrealism but a second childhood with Freudian overtones which we have to be re-educated to enjoy? -- part of the tragedy of growing up
Ken Russell
Certain levels of human understanding cannot be attained, it is claimed, until the brain can work in more than one way.
Idries Shah
The basic urge toward mysticism is never, in the unaltered man, clear enough to be recognized for what it is.
Idries Shah
It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of the man's psychological makeup is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. There will be surprises.
C.S. Lewis
I am an idol worshipper; for I understand what idol worship means, and the idolater does not.
Idries Shah
Man (as he imagines himself to be), in general, is a possibility, not a fact.
Idries Shah
It is as true as anything else which can be spoken to say that all knowledge is really available everywhere.
Idries Shah
People change and needs change. So what was Sufism once is Sufism no more.
Idries Shah
The would-be Sufi needs guidance precisely because books, texts, while telling you what is needed, do not tell you when.
Idries Shah
Well-meant techniques such as arbitrary self-mortification, are useless.
Idries Shah
It has been a messy week, and I blame myself as much as anyone else. I feel like a behaviourist who has designed her rat’s maze poorly.
Richard K. Morgan
Why do people always wonder whether books are any good, without wondering whether they are themselves in a state to profit from them?
Idries Shah
Rumi speaks of people who rely upon the written word as sometimes being no more than donkeys laden with books.
Idries Shah
All human behaviour, language, thoughts, feelings, actions, and consciousness emerge from this massively interconnected network of neurons. Each neuron is pretty dumb; it either fires in a certain situation or it doesn’t, but out of this mass dumbness comes great cleverness.
Trevor Harley
Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
Charles Darwin
He was always a little boy, and I am upset that I didn't look after him, upset there are so many kids who never get looked after, and so they can't grow up. They can get older, but they can't grow up. That takes love. If you are lucky the love will come later. If you are lucky you won't hit love in the face.
Jeanette Winterson
Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she (Mrs Winterson) was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her.
Jeanette Winterson
When I'm in doubt - as I am now - I ask myself, 'What would Carl Jung do?' - and act accordingly.
David Mitchell
Psychotherapy and counselling should make people aware of themselves and of the difficulties which they face. This then gives them the freedom to choose for themselves. In this sense, unlike behaviour therapy, psychotherapy is value-free: no advice, suggestions or recriminations are given. Indeed the only value of psychotherapy is respect for the individual. Such respect, however, in a mechanistic and objectifying society ... becomes a political act.
Paul Kline
And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it.Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time.
Jeanette Winterson
we all try to silence painful emotions. but when we succeed in feeling nothing we lose the only means we have of knowing what hurts us and why.
Stephen Grosz
But unfortunately you get no further by merely wishing class-distinctions away. More exactly, it is necessary to wish them away, but your wish has no efficacy unless you grasp what it involves. The fact that has got to be faced is that to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself. Here am I, a typical member of the middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class-distinctions. All my notions –notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful–are essentially middle-class notions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my table manners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body, are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special niche about half-way up the social hierarchy.
George Orwell
But unfortunately you get no further by merely wishing class-distinctionsaway. More exactly, it is necessary to wish them away, but your wish has noefficacy unless you grasp what it involves. The fact that has got to be faced isthat to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself. Here amI, a typical member of the middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want toget rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result ofclass-distinctions. All my notions –notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant,of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful–are essentially middle-classnotions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my tablemanners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements ofmy body, are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special nicheabout half-way up the social hierarchy.
George Orwell
The rich believe that their money will insulate them from setbacks and frustrations, and that's one of the absurdist expectations of all.
Alain de Botton
Truth is a matter of PerspectiveThere will be my truth and your truth and as Universal truth doesn't exist.
George Orwell
The relationship between these four attitudes—objectivity, immediacy, subjectivity, and reflexion—is worth consideration. At first sight it might seem that there is no difference between immediacy and subjectivity, or between objectivity and reflexion. Subjectivity and objectivity, certainly, are opposed; and so are immediacy and reflexion. But immediacy (which is naive acceptance of whatever is presented) is compatible with objectivity, as we see from Thomas Huxley's advice to the scientist: 'Sit down before fact as a little child'—; and reflexion is compatible with subjectivity (for subjectivity is 'being oneself', and reflexion, being 'self awareness', is within subjectivity). In emotional excitement objectivity and reflexion alike tend to vanish, and subjectivity then approximates to immediacy. It is this that gives subjectivity its bad name; for few people know of any subjectivity beyond emotional immediacy. Their escape from emotion is towards objectivity, in the form of distractions, rather than towards reflexion, which is the more difficult way of self control. Goethe once described the advice 'Know Thyself' (inscribed in the temple of Apollo at Delphi) as 'a singular requisition with which no man complies, or indeed ever will comply: man is by all his senses and efforts directed to externals—to the world about him'.
Nanavira Thera
It is only when you meet someoneof a different culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your ownbeliefs really are.
George Orwell
It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your own beliefs really are.
George Orwell
The desire to understand is almost synonymous with the desire to simplify, and it is closely bound up with the desire for certainty - for assurance. But, when we find we have over-simplified, this does not necessarily imply that our conclusions are wrong. It implies merely that they are less right than we thought, or that we have exaggerated their comprehensiveness.
Rupert Crawshay-Williams
People, for the most part, live in the objective-immediate mode (discussed earlier). This means that they are totally absorbed in and identified with positive worldly interests and projects, of which there is an unending variety. That is to say, although they differ from one another in their individual natures, the contents of their respective positivities, they are all alike in being positive. Thus, although the fundamental relation between positives is conflict (on account of their individual differences), they apprehend one another as all being in the same boat of positivity, and they think of men generally in terms of human solidarity, and say 'we'.But the person who lives in the subjective-reflexive mode is absorbed in and identified with, not the positive world, but himself. The world, of course, remains 'there' but he regards it as accidental (Husserl says that he 'puts it in parentheses, between brackets'), and this means that he dismisses whatever positive identification he may have as irrelevant. He is no longer 'a politician' or 'a fisherman', but 'a self'. But what we call a 'self', unless it receives positive identification from outside, remains a void, in other words a negative. A 'self', however, is positive in this respect—it seeks identification. So a person who identifies himself with himself finds that his positivity consists in negativity—not the confident 'I am this' or 'I am that' of the positive, but a puzzled, perplexed, or even anguished, 'What am I?'. (This is where we meet the full force of Kierkegaard's 'concern and unrest'.) Eternal repetition of this eternally unanswerable question is the beginning of wisdom (it is the beginning of philosophy); but the temptation to provide oneself with a definite answer is usually too strong, and one falls into a wrong view of one kind or another. (It takes a Buddha to show the way out of this impossible situation. For the sotāpanna, who has understood the Buddha's essential Teaching, the question still arises, but he sees that it is unanswerable and is not worried; for the arahat the question no longer arises at all, and this is final peace.)This person, then, who has his centre of gravity in himself instead of in the world (a situation that, though usually found as a congenital feature, can be acquired by practice), far from seeing himself with the clear solid objective definition with which other people can be seen, hardly sees himself as anything definite at all: for himself he is, at best, a 'What, if anything?'. It is precisely this lack of assured self-identity that is the secret strength of his position—for him the question-mark is the essential and his positive identity in the world is accidental, and whatever happens to him in a positive sense the question-mark still remains, which is all he really cares about. He is distressed, certainly, when his familiar world begins to break up, as it inevitably does, but unlike the positive he is able to fall back on himself and avoid total despair. It is also this feature that worries the positives; for they naturally assume that everybody else is a positive and they are accustomed to grasp others by their positive content, and when they happen to meet a negative they find nothing to take hold of.
Nanavira Thera
The significance of the dwelling is in the dweller.
Idries Shah
Embrace the anxiety of confronting your emotions because it’s often the emotional hitting of rock bottom that ignites our resolve to get back to the top.
Sam Owen
The same goes for Edward Monkford. Yes, based on what you've told me, it seems Emma was the real narcissist, not him. But there's no doubting he's an extreme controller. What happens when a controller comes up against someone who's out of control? The combination could be explosive.
J.P. Delaney
Trust is needed before lessons can be learnt.
Idries Shah
Proverbs and truisms are for this reason dangerous, because they produce blindness or non-thought.
Idries Shah
My parents, you see, were a little square. They cared more about being good parents in the general sense than being good parents for me. They wanted to appear normal; respectable and responsible. But they weren’t prepared to acknowledge my individual needs.
Joss Sheldon
The creature who lives inside my brain suggested I do it,” I offered tentatively. “It was very convincing.
Joss Sheldon
People carry on whole conversations in proverbs. But they are not LIVING the proverbs.
Idries Shah
The two centrepieces of social intelligence are the possession of extensive social knowledge about other individuals, in terms of knowing who allies and friends are, and the ability to infer the mental states of those individuals.
Steven Mithen
Presence and AbsenceA certain person may have, as you say, a wonderful presence: I do not know. What I do know is that he has a perfectly delightful absence.
Idries Shah
Our heads are filled with ‘knowledge’, a knowledge that in some areas pre-empts our seeing anything at all.
Idries Shah
Dear Sigmund,Multiple Personality Disorder is a much discussed topic in my one bedroom bedsit."Signed....Thomas, Jane, Ralf, Tom, Toomey and Spot
Anthony T.Hincks
Take the wheat, not the measure in which it is contained
Idries Shah
Solitude, the joy of being alone, stems from, as well as promotes, a state of maturity and inner richness.
Neel Burton
Loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of objective meaning from the universe.
Neel Burton
Mindless action without a real understanding of the ramifications is only likely to result in serious miscalculations or a colossal waste of time. Avoid both by using your judgment, filtered through both knowledge and experience. Use common sense and logic as a counterbalance to emotion.
David Amerland
A securely attached child will store an internal working model of a responsive, loving, reliable care-giver, and of a self that is worthy of love and attention and will bring these assumptions to bear on all other relationships. Conversely, an insecurely attached child may view the world as a dangerous place in which other people are to be treated with great caution, and see himself as ineffective and unworthy of love. These assumptions are relatively stable and enduring: those built up in the early years of life are particularly persistent and unlikely to be modified by subsequent experience.
Jeremy Holmes
Attachment exerted an invisible but powerful pull on the child, just as heavenly bodies are connected by gravitational forces. But unlike gravity, attachment makes its presence known by a negative inverse square law: the further the attached person is from their secure base, the greater the pull of attachment. The 'elastic band' which constitutes the attachment bond is slack and imperceptible in the presence of a secure base. If the secure base becomes unreliable or the limits of exploration are reached, the bond tugs at the heartstrings.
Jeremy Holmes
To feel attached is to feel safe and secure. By contrast, an insecurely attached person may have a mixture of feelings towards their attachment figure: intense love and dependency, fear of rejection, irritability and vigilance. One may theorise that their lack of security has aroused a simultaneous wish to be close and the angry determination to punish their attachment figure for the minutest sign of abandonment. It is though the insecurely attached person is saying to themselves: 'cling as hard as you can to people - they are likely to abandon you; hang on to them and hurt them if they show signs of going away, then they may be less likely to do so'. This particular pattern of insecure attachment is known as 'ambivalent insecurity'.
Jeremy Holmes
Bowlby uses the notion of faulty internal working models to describe different patterns of neurotic attachment. He sees the basic problem of 'anxious attachment" as that of maintaining attachment with a care-giver who is unpredictable or rejecting. Here the internal working model will be based not on accurate representation of the self and others, but on coping, in which the care-giver must be accommodated to. The two basic strategies here are those of avoidance or adherence, which lead to avoidant or ambivalent attachment.
Jeremy Holmes
Bowlby's conviction that attachment needs continue throughout life and are not outgrown has important implications for psychotherapy. It means that the therapist inevitably becomes an important attachment figure for the patient, and that this is not necessarily best seen as a 'regression' to infantile dependence (the developmental 'train' going into reverse), but rather the activation of attachment needs that have been previously suppressed. Heinz Kohut (1977) has based his 'self psychology' on a similar perspective. He describes 'selfobject needs' that continue from infancy throughout life and comprise an individual's need for empathic responsiveness from parents, friends, lovers, spouses (and therapists). This responsiveness brings a sense of aliveness and meaning, security and self-esteem to a person's existence. Its lack leads to narcissistic disturbances of personality characterised by the desperate search for selfobjects - for example, idealisation of the therapist or the development of an erotic transference. When, as they inevitably will, these prove inadequate (as did the original environment), the person responds with 'narcissistic rage' and disappointment, which, in the absence of an adequate 'selfobject' cannot be dealt with in a productive way.
Jeremy Holmes
All we've got is Now. Life, composed of a billion moments, from our first to our last thoughts.
Max McKeown
The fully human person is in deep and meaningful contact with the world outside of him. He not only listens to himself, but to the voices of the world. The breadth of his own individual experience is infinitely multiplied through a sensitive empathy with others. He suffers with the suffering, rejoices with the joyful. He is born again in every springtime, feels the impact of the great mysteries of life: birth, growth, love, suffering, death. His heart skips along with the 'young lovers', and he knows something of the exhilaration that is in them. He also knows the ghetto's philosophy of despair, the loneliness of suffering without relief, and the bell never tolls without tolling in some strange way for him.
John Powell
But just as my philosophy had ceased to interest me as soon as it was formulated into a set of principles so, when I saw myself being imitated, I realised at once what an incubus my aesthetic personality might become if I were to be trapped within it. Imitation changes, not the impersonator, but the impersonated.
Peter Ackroyd
Has it not occurred to you that, conversely, other people do not have your difficulties because they do not react as you do to what happens?
Idries Shah
The abnegation of empathy in the case of something as complex and variable as sexual taste is a dangerous thing. The particular misfortune of the paedophile is not that he is a walking manifestation of evil but that his or her sexual development (as much subject to nature, nurture and questions of identity as any of ours) has resulted in a potentially very harmful and unacceptable attraction. We rightly call it a disorder because of these damaging effects, but merely reacting with horror will do little towards solving a complex and difficult issue stemming from a sexual drive as real and compulsive as any of us are used to.
Derren Brown
Obviously, there must be some connection between the subordination of actual individuals and the grotesque exaltation of symbolic ones like Kim Il Sung.
Christopher Hitchens
The healthier people are, the more they are willing to admit to their limitations and so the more open they are to the possibility of improvement.
Robin Skynner
Shall we go?' he murmured, perhaps regretting his decision to show me his army of plastic cartoon figurines.
Jon Ronson
There is a noticeable element of the pathological in some current leftist critiques, which I tend to attribute to feelings of guilt allied to feelings of impotence. Not an attractive combination, because it results in self-hatred.
Christopher Hitchens