Viktor Frankl: The Final Wisdom

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.”

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

“When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.”

“A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life, I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.”

“Even when it is not fully attained, we become better for striving for a higher goal.”

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

“When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.”

All quotes by Viktor Frankl

You Are Not a Tree

Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better.

You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.

If you don’t like how things are, change it! You’re not a tree.

If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.

If you go to work on your goals, your goals will go to work on you. If you go to work on your plan, your plan will go to work on you. Whatever good things we build end up building us.

Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day.

All quotes by Jim Rohn

Pablo Picasso: The Chief Enemy of Creativity

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.”

“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”

“The world today doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?”

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

“The chief enemy of creativity is ‘good’ sense.”

“I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.”

“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.”

“Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.”

“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”

“Youth has no age.”

“He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.”

All quotes by Pablo Picasso

Don Miguel Ruiz: The Real You

“We only see what we want to see; we only hear what we want to hear. Our belief system is just like a mirror that only shows us what we believe.”

“Life is so much brighter when we focus on what truly matters.”

“Every human is an artist. And this is the main art that we have: the creation of our story.”

“Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive – the risk to be alive and express what we really are.”

“Just imagine becoming the way you used to be as a very young child, before you understood the meaning of any word, before opinions took over your mind. The real you is loving, joyful, and free. The real you is just like a flower, just like the wind, just like the ocean, just like the sun.”

All quotes by Don Miguel Ruiz

Rainer Maria Rilke: The Only Journey

“If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.”

“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”

“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”

“The only journey is the one within.”

“No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.”

“Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror. Just keep going, no feeling is final.”

“I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.”

“Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”

All quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

Terence McKenna: Face the Answer

“The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer.”

“We are caged by our cultural programming. Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside the mass hallucination you see it for what it’s worth.”

“Culture is not your friend, it’s an impediment to understanding what’s going on. That’s why the words cult and culture have a direct relationship to each other. Culture is an extremely repressive cult that leads to all kinds of humiliation and degradation, and automatic, unquestioned and unthinking behaviour.”

“The cost of sanity, in this society, is a certain level of alienation.”

“Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existance is defined in terms of control.”

“Personal empowerment means deconditioning yourself from the values and the programs of the society and putting your own values and programs in place.”

“We are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get this, get that.’ And then you’re a player, but you don’t want to play in the game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”

“We have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.”

“If the words ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ don’t include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn’t worth the hemp it was written on.”

“It’s clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it’s not easy.”

“We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.”

“If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.”

All quotes by Terence McKenna

Simone de Beauvoir: Reasons for Living

“The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project.”

“Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.”

“One can not start by saying our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends on us to give it importance.”

“I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.”

“If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.”

“Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.”

“I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth – and truth rewarded me.”

“One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion.”

“All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception.”

“Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.”

“That’s what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.”

“All success cloaks a surrender.”

Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir
Illustration by Simon James (of Standard Design)