A human's needs for a good life are his human rights.
Mortimer Adler

"When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade."
Unknown.

The crappy part of life is just my compost pile, and I'm chosin' seeds.
A very positive client of mine.

"The way to get your feet on the ground is to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps!"
on M*A*S*H

When I've got the choice of two evils, I pick the one I never tried before.
Mae West

The higher a woman's IQ, the more she is likely to be masculine in outlook. The higher a man's IQ, the more likely he is to be feminine in outlook.
Lucius Cervantes

Love and jealousy are incompatible.
Heinlein [So which would you rather be rid of?! ]

The true source of all aggression is love frustrated.
Ashley Montague

You must love me voluntarily. (Ibid?)

Sex is the lowest form of love, and its highest expression.
letter to R. Rimmer

St Augustine: "He that is not jealous is not in love." [No! The OPPOSITE!!]

La Rochefoucauld: In jealousy, there is more self-love than love.

Goethe: a [man] doesn't learn to understand anything unless he loves it.

Proust: Love is space and time measured by the heart.

Part of love is the desire to be known.

(Guy on TV) Four danger signals for a marriage (or any relationship): Contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and withdrawal. (JKH: "You're stupid and don't know what you're talking about; it's not my fault, and I want not to talk about it!" It's all the opposite of my favorites: communication and respect.) Another large part of love is admiration. Proof being that you cannot describe a love that has none!

Understanding does not prove forgiveness; but forgiveness necessitates understanding. Understanding is the greater part of forgiveness, understanding gives respect, and respect is the greater part of love.

Love is the assurance of empathic caring and passion for and from someone whose happiness is stimulated by your own.

Tact is the expression of obvious feedback with anger in the foreground, but with obvious love in the background.

Til recently, in the proposing and accepting of marriage, he made his first big decision just as she made her last!

Genitals are merely like belly-buttons; some are innies, some are outies!

Sex without committment feels like a bed without blankets; a saddle without a horse. (Or is it a horse w/o a saddle? Ya get a ride, but it hard to stay there!)

Would it be worth starting a relationship that would not be painful to end?

Marriage is the price you pay for having hormones. It's socio-biology.

Jealousy is an infection by the viruses known as selfishness, suspicion, and insecurity.

Jealousy is a sure and efficient way of getting rid of all you're afraid of losing!

"Ya fall into love, and then ya fall into a rut; it's all a downhill process!"

Like with car dealers, marriage legalities oughta include a "lemon law", so you got thirty days to take it back!

The nature of love is self-abandonment, not clinging to oneself.

Just as jealousy is the surest way to lose what you fear losing, censorship is a sure way to get more of what you are working to get rid of.

If I want to change myself, I must love that new image of myself enough to identify with it, not want it so much that I can't.

You can't have what you want too much, and you won't get what you don't move toward; however, if you're not desperate for it, and you do move toward it, there's a chance you might get it. BTW--it's permitted to move toward many desires at once.

Fact: You are the world's foremost authority on your feelings.

Often, one concentrates on molehills of problems, so as to avoid seeing the mountains!

Inhibitions grow to the extent that we don't.

Something not in resistance to a force does not feel that force. (There's something very Zen in that!)
And yet...
You'll sit on the curb a long time, waitin' for someone else to insist on your right to cross the street.

You are not only what you put into your mouth, you are what comes out of your mouth, because your subconscious is learning from it. ...good reason to say what you really think/feel.

The more important part of honesty being the best policy is that it requires integration of your beliefs, ideals and behavior.

Assertiveness expresses identity. Aggression expresses a desire for control over others, which hints at a weak identity.

Stress is caused by a lack of decision. Hamlet's indecision came from and led to... a lack of identity. Boy, was he stressed!

The decision to continue to do anything is remade every time you do that thing!

Rebellion is an assertion of the status of decidability, and thus, identity.

Can you do something you want to do, in spite of the fact that "they" want you to do it?

If you put out enough crap, some of it's bound to hit the fan.

You don't appreciate what you get too easily, no matter what its value.

It's often the easy things that are the hardest.

A failure is an experiment that successfully found out what doesn't work.

You learn something new every day --that you didn't want to know.... May we all understand a tenth of what we know.

Low self-esteem has no easier-seeming remedy than to wield power over someone weaker: the "identified patient".

Ideally, we would all be the co-authors of the (very few) laws we live by. Then there'd be no need of them.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.
Samuel Johnson

To change and to improve are two different things.
German Proverb

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but also to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
Dorothy Nevill

"The great master fallacy of the mind is believing too much."
A. Bain, 1859, "The Emotions And The Will".

We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves to be like other people.
Schopenhauer

Any pain fills.
Victor Frankl

"He who slings mud loses ground."
Adlai Stevenson

"The more we've been hurt, the more we distort reality."
(Perls?)

The passive voice trades responsibility for guilt and a lowering of self-esteem.

An ascetic is a weak-willed person who easily gives in to the pleasure of denying himself something.
Ambrose Bierce... so:

A martyr is a selfish person who will easily give away or give up something that seems very important to others, to get something that's very important to him/herself.

A pseudo-altruist is a greedy person who easily gives in to the pleasure of obtaining gratefulness.

The greedy mock those who recognize sufficiency.
Selfishness is often not in one's own best interests!

As a True Altruist, you would want to do your part to make it the world you want, by being part of the world you want it to become.

Once you have changed an old behavior, that behavior isn't you any more, so having had it in the past is not a criticism of who you are now!

Speak daggers of truth and let the participles fall where they may.

Too often, what's shown as charity is really only someone taking public credit for giving something today to someone who could've gotten it out of their garbage can tomorrow. That kind of charity is the milk of human blindness.

This is what I call the "Telepathic Imperative", common to uncommunicative people: "What I'm thinking/feeling is so important that you must know. If you don't, it's your fault."

Hatred is an acid that no flesh can hold without harm to itself.

Change is evolutionary, and evolution is a series of small revolutions!

Your future isn't in the past!
You will always have had your past!
For the time being, the present is all we have.
When all else fails, make a decision.

Perhaps, if you don't feel free to talk about who you were... you still are who you were.

Every change toward your desires makes you more individual; every "should" you accept makes you less so. Full individuality requires having no shoulds.

Grammatically, "should" is similar to "hopefully", in that there's no one in the sentence doing the hoping. Worse, in a should, psychologically, there's no one doing the wanting!

Desires are part of the natural "flow of life", and suppression is a blockage of it for reasons outside the self.

Every decision is also a decision about who you are, who you will be, and who you won't be.

The only real control is decision following awareness and desire (both required!); as beauty is form following function.

Aesthetics is where logic and passion meet.

Perhaps the ancient mystery / enigma of women is that even they didn't know who they were.

Few things are not a matter of degree.

Reality is just a means to an end...

Better to be self-aware than self-involved. It's curious that some are only self-involved, when the greater the awareness, the greater the freedom. Is it that they have a fear of freedom?

It's really funny to see how hard we defend who we've accidently become, as if those accidents were our greatest accomplishments!

If communication were the only definition of "human", you would be human only to the degree that you could accurately communicate!

No one ever felt only one way about anything.

Only a wise person knows their ignorance.

Maturity is simply feeling, on the average, adequate; and being content (if not satisfied) with that.

Change what you can, accept what you're sure you can't, and trust your wisdom to feel the difference.
updated from old Irish saying (JKH)

If there are two courses of action, always chose the third.
old Jewish saying

The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on.
Nor all your piety nor wit
can lure it back to cancel half a line,
nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
~Omar Kahyam

The secret of living without frustration and worry... is to avoid becoming personally involved in your own life.
Tom Wilson (Ziggy cartoon)

Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from poor judgement.
Aesop

Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once! (It's not working!)
Seen on the net.

Obscurity is the refuge of incompetence.
~Heinlein

Intellectualism is the last refuge of an obsessive.
~JKH

"We have associated simplicity with poverty and have discovered that affluence without simplicity is a giant trap. Every saint who ever lived, lived simply; not because he was holier, but because he was smarter."
~Eric Severied (CBS evening news, 2-28-75):

And that's the way it is... Walter Chronkite