Where they love, they do not desire, and where they desire they cannot love.” ~ Freud

"Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills." ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

He wants to know how it looks like on the edge of the cliff.  ~Anonymous

I shall consider human actions and desires in exactly the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids. —BARUCH SPINOZA

Ce n’est pas de l’amour, c’est de la rage. (It’s not love, it’s fury.) French proverb

Jacques Lacan: Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. 

Jacques Lacan: We in fact address ... those we do not know, true Others, true subjects. They are on the other side of the wall of language, there where in principle I never reach them. Fundamentally, it is them I’m aiming at every time I utter true speech,...I always aim at the true subject, and I have to be content with shadows. The subject is separated from the Others, the true ones, by the wall of language.  ----  Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis.

 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1992): The deep dissatisfaction we find in every psychology—including the one we have founded thanks to psychoanalysis—derives from the fact that it is nothing more than a mask, and sometimes even an alibi, of the effort to focus on the problem of our own action—something that is the essence and very foundation of all ethical reflection.

Lacan: Isn't there something in analytic discourse that can introduce us to the following: that every subsistence or persistence of the world as such must be abandoned? 

Augustine: If I knew myself, I would know you. 

Viktor Frankl: "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."

Kabir: "Wherever you are, that is the entry point."

At what point does loving someone become self-sabotage? - Sarah Bahbah 

Gilbert Chesterton: “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

W. Somerset Maugham: There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror. 

Sneezing: Why do we say bless you when someone sneezes, but we say nothing when someone coughs?

“Why is it that nobody understands me, yet everybody likes me?” —Albert Einstein --- Quoted in an interview with New York Times, March 12,1944.

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”  Albert Einstein --- To Carl Seelig – March 11,1952

The most beautiful experience we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. . . ” Einstein, From “The World As I See It” (1930), reprinted in Ideas and Opinions, 11.

'...To prevent someone who KNOWS from filling the empty space.' Wilfred Bion

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair.

An English professor wrote the words, “Woman without her man is nothing” on the blackboard and directed his students to punctuate it correctly. The men wrote: “Woman, without her man, is nothing.” The women wrote: “Woman: Without her, man is nothing.” (Anonymous.)

'People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus.' Marcel Proust

'Meaning is not something you stumble across, like an answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of your experience of humankind as it is passed to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something.' Buzz McCoy: Living into Leadership. A Journey in Ethics.

...man is defined as a human being and woman is defined as a female. Whenever she tries to behave as a human being she is accused of trying to emulate the male... Simone de Beauvoir.

Bruno Bettelheim: "At the heart of our work is not any particular knowledge or any procedure as such, but an inner attitude to life and to those caught up in its struggle, even as we are."

'The point is thus to acknowledge 'the presence, within the I itself, of a realm of irreducible otherness, of absolute contingency and incomprehensibility.' Žižek, Slavoj. 'Deleuze and the Lacanian Real.' in: Lacan.com. 2007. (English).

Even a man who is very well able to carry out an analysis on other people can behave like any other mortal and be capable of producing the most intense resistances as soon as he himself becomes the object of analytic investigation.  — Sigmund Freud

A father, said Stephen, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil. James Joyce, Ulysses.

A child always, in part, wants even to be weaned.  Edna O'Shaughnessy, 'The Absent Object' 

“What do you do from morning to night?" “I endure myself.”      ~ Emile M. Cioran