Purpose and Direction
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“How can a man come to know himself? Never by thinking, but by doing. Try to do your duty and you will know at once what you are worth.”
“Few people order their lives by a purpose; the rest drift like things carried by a river. Decide what you want, then stay with it.”
“To be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain understanding must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself ... the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.”
“If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.”
“Directions cannot be given for achieving personal excellence, because we are all different. The gifts and potentialities of one person are not those of another. Indeed, each person is unique. His or her gifts and abilities are probably not exactly matched by anyone else on earth. And from this it follows that one person’s excellence is his or hers alone. No one can tell you how to achieve yours.”
“Yes, solitude is greater than I anticipated. My sense of values is changing, and many things which before were in solution in my mind now seem to be crystallizing.”
“First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.”
“I know that it gives one great inner force, calmness, and happiness to communicate with such great thinkers as Socrates, Epictetus, Arnold, Parker. ... They tell us about what is most important for humanity, about the meaning of life and about virtue.”
“A scholar knows many books; a well-educated person has knowledge and skills; an enlightened person understands the meaning and purpose of his life.”
“You regard it as a misfortune to die without seeing such sights. But when there is no need to travel at all, and where you are already, and Zeus is present in his works; will you not desire to contemplate these things and understand them? Will you never perceive either who you are, or for what you have been born, or the purpose for which this vision has been given to you?”
“The call is to leave a certain social situation, move into your own loneliness and find the jewel, the center that’s impossible to find when you’re socially engaged ... This is the departure when the hero feels something has been lost and goes to find it ... The first step, detachment or withdrawal, consists in a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world ...”
“For you see what our discussions are all about - and is there anything about which a man of even small intelligence would be more serious than this: what is the way we ought to live?”
“It was most essential for me to have a normal life in the real world as a counterpoise to that strange inner world ... The unconscious contents could have driven me out of my wits. But my family, and the knowledge: I have a medical diploma ... I must help my patients, I have a wife and five children ... these were actualities which made demands upon me and proved to me again and again that I really existed.”
“I sacrifice myself for my profession, my wife, my children, or, more properly expressed, I do not sacrifice myself for them, but I find in them my satisfaction and joy.”
“To will to be himself is man’s true vocation ... blockages in self-awareness [occur] because the individual [is] unable to move through accumulations of anxiety at various points in his growth. Kierkegaard makes it clear that selfhood depends upon the individual’s capacity to confront anxiety and move ahead despite it.”
“I am less convinced that intimate personal relationships are the only source of health and happiness. In the present climate, there is a danger that love is being idealized as the only path to salvation. When Freud was asked what constituted psychological health, he gave as his answer the ability to love and work. We have over-emphasized the former, and paid too little attention to the latter ...”
“I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans”
“We fear our highest possibilities. We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments ... We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves ... And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe, and fear before these very same possibilities.”
“The capacity to bear anxiety is important for the individual’s self-realization and for his conquest of his environment. Every person experiences continual shocks and threats to his existence; indeed, self-actualization occurs only at the price of moving ahead despite such shocks. This indicates the constructive use of anxiety.”
“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”