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Quotations

The „riddle of human kind“ and the question of the „meaning of life“ have been considered by people as long as people have existed, and since the first records related to these issues we have got evidence of it.
I like wise and sophisticated quotations, no matter who or which time they come from.
The following quotations reflect a lot of my attitudes, parts of my philosophy of life and also the backgrounds of my way of working with people.
I hope you enjoy reading my selection.

Woody Allen:
The most difficult thing about life is making heart and mind work together.

Aristoteles:
Everybody can get angry, this is easy. But getting angry with the right person, in the right amount, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way is really hard.

Augustinus:
The history of the parents is the book the children read in.

Martin Buber:
A person becomes a self through encountering the other.

J. J. Rousseau:
Man’s freedom is not doing what he wants but doing NOT what he does NOT want.

L. Börne (German-Jewish journalist):
Great passions are like fundamental forces of nature. Whether they are useful or harmful only depends on the direction they take.

W. Churchill:
We earn our living by what we receive and we live on what we donate.

Dostojewski:
Tears purify your heart.

Albert Einstein:
A problem cannot be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

M. Ebner v. Eschenbach:
An essential characteristic of great people is that their demands on others are much lower than on themselves.

Mahatma Gandhi:
You and me – we are one. I cannot hurt you without hurting myself.

G. Galilei:
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God, who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forget their use.

J. W. v. Goethe:
Ingratitude is always a kind of weakness. I have never known men of ability to be ungrateful.

V. van Gogh:
I want something more concise, more simple, more serious; I want more soul and more love and more heart.

H. Heine:
All strong people love life.

H. Hesse:
You have to attempt the impossible in order to achieve the possible.

Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.

F. Hölderlin:
I believe that impatience is the trap into which even the best can easily fall.

Kierkegaard:
Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards.

M. L. King:
No problem is resolved by waiting indolently that God might resolve it.

K. Lorenz:
Spoken is not heard, heard is not understood, understood is not believed.

F. Nietzsche:
Everything that is done out of love always happens beyond good and evil.

Plato:
To find yourself, your soul must encounter another soul.

Touched by love every human becomes a philosopher.

Good is Beauty.

There is no harm in doing good again and again.

We do not learn. What we call learning is only a process of memory.

Rilke:
All the strength we donate comes back to us even more mature and transformed.

Try to love the questions themselves ... live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.“

Rumi:
Weeds grow in a month, a rose needs an entire year.

Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

F. Schiller:
Nothing leads to good that is not natural.

H. Schleifer:
We grow up and we heal down.

We are born in connection, we are hurt in connection and we can heal in connection.

Seneca:
It is not too little time we have but it is too much time we do not use.

We do not dare do it because it is hard but it’s hard because we do not dare do it.

G. B. Shaw:
The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.

People’s wisdom is not measured by their experience, but by their ability to experience.

M. Twain:
The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.


I. D. Yalom:
Creating a formal diagnosis is not only a nuisance. Moreover, it can hinder our work (as psychotherapists) by obscuring our view of or even negating the multi-faceted human, who confronts us in flesh and blood in our practice


C. Zuckmayer:
Onehalf of life is luck; the other half is discipline – and that is the important half, for without discipline you would not know what to do with luck.

 

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