Food for Thought
Here are a few of my favourite quotations illustrating some of the ideas and values that underlie my clinical practice:
"When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool." (Chinua Achebe)
"The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different or truer answers" (M. Scott Peck)
"Problems cannot be solved by thinking within the framework in which they were created. " (Albert Einstein)
"The road that stretches before us is a challenge to the heart long before it tests the strength of our legs." (Thomas Aquinas)
"Experience has shown that, ironically, it is often our very attempts to solve the problem that, in fact, maintain it. The attempted solutions become the true problem." (Giorgio Nardone and Paul Watzlawick)
"Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard." (Lao-Tzu)
"There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them." (Denis Waitley)
"There is no baser folly than the infatuation that looks upon the transient as if it were everlasting." (Tiruvalluvar)
"Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find that you have crossed the mountain." (Author unknown)
"The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it." (W. M. Lewis)
"Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt." (William Shakespeare)
"Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart. And try to love the questions themselves." (Rainer Maria Rilke)
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." (Aristotle)
"Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion." (Henry David Thoreau)
"My actions are my only true belongings." (Thich Nhat Hanh)
"What counts in a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility." (Leo Tolstoy)
"Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction." (Antoine De Saint-Exupery)
"Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I will meet you there." (Jalal Ad-Din Rumi)
"If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance." (George Bernard Shaw)
"Life is not lost by dying! Life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand uncaring ways." (Stephen Vincent Benet)
"Remember, people will judge you by your actions, not your intentions. You may have a heart of gold, but so does a hard-boiled egg." (Navjot Singh Sidhu)
"In essence, the practice (of mindfulness) is always the same: instead of falling prey to a chain reaction of self-hatred, we gradually learn to catch the emotional reaction and drop the story lines." (Pema Chodron)
"If I continue to do what I've always done, then I'm going to get what I've always got." (Steven C Hayes, Karl Strosahl, and Kelly Wilson)
"When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less important whether I am afraid." (Audre Lorde)
"I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this." (Emo Philips)
