Words from Others on this Topic

There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need only do inner work, in order to be alive like this; that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself … The fact is, a person is so far formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.

Christopher Alexander, 1979, from the book The Timeless Way of Building

Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

John Updike, 1989, from the book Self-Consciousness: Memoirs

She might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire.

E. M. Forster, 1910, from the novel Howard's End

Freedom is the individual’s capacity to know that he is the determined one, to pause between stimulus and response and thus to throw his weight, however slight it may be, on the side of one particular response among several possible ones.

Indeed I would define mental health as the capacity to be aware of the gap between stimulus and response, together with the capacity to use this gap constructively.

Rollo May, 1963, from the article “Freedom and Responsibility Re-Examined”

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.

Victor Frankl, 1946, from the book Man's Search for Meaning

Genuine happiness is always rooted in absorption in something outside us, and begins in accomplishment undertaken for its own sake and pursued to its own odd and buzzing ends.

Adam Gopnik, 2024, from the book All That Happiness Is

Mastery of the inner world, with a relative contempt for the outer, must inevitably lead to great catastrophe. Mastery of the outer world, to the exclusion of the inner, delivers us over to the demonic forces of the latter, and keeps us barbaric despite all outward forms of culture.

Cary Baynes, 1931, from the book Translator's Preface to The Secret of the Golden Flower

At the personalistic level… man becomes centrally concerned with peace with his inner self and in the relation of his self to the inner self of others. He becomes concerned with belonging, with being accepted, with knowing the inner side of self and other selves so harmony can come to be, so people as individuals can be at peace with themselves and thus with the world. And when he achieves this, he finds he must become concerned with more than self or other selves, because while he was focusing on the inner self to the exclusion of the external world, his outer world has gone to pot. So now he turns outward to life and to the whole, the total universe. As he does so he begins to see the problems of restoring the balance of life which has been torn asunder by his individualistically oriented, self-seeking climb up the first ladder of existence.

Clare W. Graves, 1974, from the article “The Futurist: Human Nature Prepares for a Momentous Leap”

Relevant Reference Models

The Four Quadrants