Inspirational Quotes

Here are words for thought and perhaps inspiration.  If any are familiar, I suspect that, like me, you do not tire of them…

Geoff Kane

“Getting discouraged is a total waste of your time.” John Cleese

“Adopt the pace of Nature. Her secret is patience.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Experience is the teacher of all things.” Julius Caesar

“Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation.” D. Elton Trueblood

“Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.” Nikos Kazantzakis

“You are never too old to set another goal or dream a new dream.” Les Brown

“Clinging to the past is the problem. Embracing change is the solution.” Gloria Steinem

“What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?” Vincent Van Gogh

“Scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue. Realize the strength, move on.” Henry Rollins

“Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” Napoleon Hill

“We don’t see things as we they are, we see them as we are.” Anais Nin

“Patience is the companion of wisdom.” Saint Augustine

“Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.” Madeleine L’Engle

“The beauty in life is to fight in a difficult situation.” Shirin Ebadi

“Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself, something that encompasses you but is not defined by your existence alone.”
~ John McCain, US Senator

“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”
~ Buddha

“Every flood will have an ebb.”
~Scottish proverb

“Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle.”
~Paulo Freire

“The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day; a movement is only people moving.”
~Gloria Steinem

“What you get by achieving your goals is not a important as what you become by achieving your goals.”
~Henry David Thoreau

“One isn’t born courageous, one becomes it. ~Marjane Satrapi

“Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.”

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

“When our families thrive, our community thrives.”

~ Susan Walker

“…the key to healing…understanding how the human organism works.”

~ Bessel van der Kolk

“We are more alike than we are unalike.”

~ Maya Angelou
Letter to My Daughter

“If nobody can learn from the past,
then there’s no point in raking it up.”

~ Billie Holiday
from her autobiography
Lady Sings the Blues

“There are no guarantees in the risky business of loving others, but it is never wasted.”

~ A. Philip Parham
Letting God

“Preconceived ideas are like searchlights which illumine the path of the experimenter and serve him as a guide to interrogate nature.  They become a danger only if he transforms them into fixed ideas—this is why I should like to see these profound words inscribed on the threshold of all the temples of science:  ‘The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so.’ ”

~ Louis Pasteur, in a speech to the French Academy of Medicine,
July 18, 1876 (translation by Rene J. Dubos)

“The impact of our communication on another person depends not so much on what we say as how we say it. And not so much on how we say it as who we are at that moment.”

~Anthony Martignetti

“When we humans speak, we are not merely communicating information but attempting to make an impression and achieve a goal.”

~ Francine Prose

“…we cannot save our face and our ass at the same time.”

~ Narcotics Anonymous (4th Edition, p 78)

“The first goal is for the clinician to find the patient, and the patient to find the clinician, as both are required for a real alliance.”

~ Leston Havens

“Suffering brings the patient to us…the patient needs to feel heard and seen—that is, met, by another person….”

~ Leston Havens

“We have to have the courage to tell the truth…and the courage to sit with the patient’s truth.”

~ Mel Pohl

“Many patients cannot hear until they feel heard.”

~ Leston Havens

“Above all, the clinician must not shake what little faith the patient has in himself.”

~ Leston Havens

“An argument can be made that relationship building is the treatment.”

~ Leston Havens

“Today many medications act across diagnostic groups. Alliance effects also transcend specific psychotherapy methods. Both may be affecting profound psychopathological processes.”

~ Leston Havens

“…the eternal ambiguity of human motives and memory.”

~ Ben Brantley

“May your inherent knowing guide you.”

~ Marta Carbone

“…the sound of story is the dominant sound in our lives…”

~ Reynolds Price

“Story is about eternal, universal forms, not formulas.”

~ Robert McKee, on screenwriting, 1997

“Stories are people, place, …and trouble.”

~ Jay O’Callahan

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”

~ Philip Pullman

“Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must add, of telling a story.”

~ Antonio Damasio

“No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself.”

~ James Russell Lowell

“And it helps to also be thoroughly sincere in dealing with others.”

~ Geoff Kane

“…openness is the first step toward recovery… addiction remains a secret because of the overwhelming shame associated with it.”

~ David Sheff, Afterword, Beautiful Boy

“There is more to who we are and more to why we do the things we do than what meets our own minds… Lower centers of the Central Nervous System can, and routinely do, act independently of higher centers.”

~ Geoff Kane

“We are all storytellers, and we are the stories we tell.”

~ McAdams, Josselson, & Lieblich

“God made man because he loves stories.”

~ Elie Wiesel

“ …the amygdala, along with related areas…, plays a crucial role in coordinating perceptions with memory and behavior. These regions are especially sensitive to social interactions.”

~ Daniel J. Siegel, MD

“A feeling of self-respect flows into us when we stand up and say ‘I did something wrong.’  This statement also says, ‘I have the strength to face my responsibilities and repair my mistakes.’  It is surprisingly helpful to our self-esteem, and it improves our relationships.”

~ M. A. F.
Touchstones

“I have to learn to tell on my disease.”

~ Female patient in her 30s

“Honesty is more important than image…as long as you are still alive, talking about your substance use is more important than the fact that you used.”

~ Geoff Kane

“May our tears be turned into dancing!”

~ Dan Schutte
City of God (hymn)

“Eighty percent of success is showing up.”

~ Woody Allen

“Just be damn careful where you show up.”

~ Geoff Kane

“For every human problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”

~ H. L. Mencken

“Happiness cannot be sought directly; it is a by-product of love and service.”

~ Twenty-Four Hours a Day

“I get so caught up in the whirl and swirl of tomorrow that I forget to fully enjoy today.”

~ Rokelle Lerner

“My drug of choice is pharmaceutical heroin.”

~ 26 year old male from
Washington County, Maine

“I have a passion for alcohol.”

~ 25 year old female

“Any addict knows, you’ll do anything to get it.”

~ 23 year old male

“Our limbic system sets the mind’s emotional tone and stores our highly charged emotional memories.”

~ Tian Dayton, PhD

“New research shows that emotions have a separate system of nerve pathways, through the limbic system to the cortex, allowing emotional signals to avoid conscious control.”

~ Robert Ornstein, 1991

“…unconscious decisions for action go on constantly inside the head.”

~ Robert Ornstein

“We’re worse off than Freud thought, because many actions proceed without our knowing anything about them.”

~ Robert Ornstein

“Addiction is like gravity— governed by laws of nature that never take time off.”

~ Geoff Kane

“Neural repatterning comes as we enter into and sustain new types of relationships that allow us to reregulate our sense impressions slowly and over time.”

~ Tian Dayton, PhD

“Interpersonal experience shapes the mind as it continues to develop throughout the lifespan… Interactions with the environment, especially relationships with other people, directly shape the development of the brain’s structure and function.”

~ Daniel J. Siegel, MD

Client: “What can I do when I can’t bear to face the music I’ve created?”
Clinician: “Dance!”

“…what is needed isn’t merely tolerance but acceptance, wholehearted and unconditional.”

~ Maria Popova