We can’t change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently.
Anytime you’re gonna grow, you’re gonna lose something. You’re losing what you’re hanging onto to keep safe. You’re losing habits that you’re comfortable with, you’re losing familiarity.
The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It’s hard to get out of that box. That’s the dominant situation all over the world.
The easy path of aging is to become a thick-skinned, unbudging curmudgeon, a battle-ax. To grow soft and sweet is the harder way.
Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.
So when you consider the archetypal, historical, and cultural background of whatever you do, it gives you a sense that your occupation can be a calling and not just a job.
To see the angel in the malady requires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding of one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere.
I don’t think you can revive traditions on purpose.
All we can do when we think of kids today is think of more hours of school, earlier age at the computer, and curfews. Who would want to grow up in that world?
What I try to point out is the role an ordinary person can have in seeing the child’s destiny. You have to have a feeling for the child.
I think we’re miserable partly because we have only one god, and that’s economics.
Teachers today can’t take to a child.
Loss means losing what was We want to change but we don’t want to lose. Without time for loss, we don’t have time for soul.
Until the culture recognizes the legitimacy of growing down, each person in the culture struggles blindly to make sense of the darkness that the soul requires to deepen into life.
Each of us needs an adequate biography: How do I put together into a coherent image the pieces of my life? How do I find the basic plot of my story?
It’s important to ask yourself, How am I useful to others? What do people want from me? That may very well reveal what you are here for.
You don’t know what you’re going to get into when you follow your bliss.
Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul.
How can Hitler, or some other murderer, appear in this world? I don’t think any single theory can account for the phenomenon, and I think it’s a mistake to try to reduce it to being brutalized by your parents or having grown up in some horrible situation – like Charles Manson.