Fear and Avoidance
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“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.”
“You can completely lose track of incredibly positive things about yourself - your beauty, goodness, strength, and virtue ... the so-called Golden shadow.”
“Not all who hesitate are lost.”
“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
If not you, then who else?
Maslow asked students who would write a great novel or become a great composer; when they squirmed he asked: If not you, then who else?
“For practical life at any rate, the CHANCE of salvation is enough. No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference ... between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.”
The Stoic archer and preferred indifferents
Like an archer who controls his training, aim and release but not the wind or target once the arrow leaves the bow, we control our health and work habits but not genes, illness or outcomes; health and wealth are preferred indifferents, but worth lies in what we do with the situation.
“The greatest height of heroism to which an individual can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how to make oneself ridiculous and not to shrink from the ridicule.”
“The concept of greatness entails ... being able to be different.”
“What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, in the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco. But there’s also the possibility of bliss.”
“We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more in imagination than in reality.”
“‘Anger is useful,’ says our adversary, ‘because it makes men more ready to fight.’ According to that mode of reasoning, then, drunkenness also is a good thing, for it makes men insolent and daring, and many use their weapons better when the worse for liquor. ... No man becomes braver through anger, except one who without anger would not have been brave at all: anger does not therefore come to assist courage, but to take its place.”
“The difficulties of our psychotherapeutic work teach us to take truth, goodness, and beauty where we find them. They are not always found where we look for them: often they are hidden in the dirt or are in the keeping of the dragon.”
“By not venturing, it is so dreadfully easy to lose that which it would be difficult to lose in even the most venturesome venture ... For if I have ventured amiss - very well, then life helps me by its punishment. But if I have not ventured at all - who then helps me?”
“In short, the wise man looks to the purpose of all actions, not their consequences; beginnings are in our power but Fortune judges the outcome, and I do not grant her verdict upon me.”
“A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition ... I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways ... Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.”
“The impetus that makes you fly is our great human possession. Everybody has it. It is the feeling of being linked with the roots of power, but one soon becomes afraid of this feeling ... That is why most people shed their wings and prefer to walk and obey the law.”
“Maturity is the capacity to endure uncertainty.”
“Suppose that I become dissatisfied with my habitual self, or feel that there are areas of experience or self-understanding which I cannot reach. One way of exploring these is to remove myself from present surroundings and see what emerges. This is not without its dangers. Any form of new organization or integration within the mind has to be preceded by some degree of disorganization.”
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”