The American Southwest by kevindooley

I love to collect quotations. I have been doing it for over thirty years so have accumulated quite a few. With the growth of excellent sites for quotations, I have quit collecting them and began using them in posts.

My favorite quotation sites are:

1. The quote garden: has been online for 11 years and have concise but unusual quotes. It has a quote hug which is a teddy bear with a quote that you can send to others.

2. Quoteland.com: has a very active series of reader forums about quotations in case you want to join discussions with others about quotes. The forums include an active writers club.

3. From brainyquote.com, you may add the “quote of the day” to your blog or site.

4. Quotations from the other pages has detailed descriptions of each of the collections that are included here.

I am including some of my favorite quotations about recovery and/or self-discovery.

The quotation that I adopted as the Changemaker quote:

“It is the courage to be open and loving which is the manifestation of underlying strength and power. And it is only in embracing the possibility that you have a Higher Self that knows how to love, that knows truth within, that is truly powerful, that you can begin to face and dismantle the false beliefs of the protected self, the ego. You can’t begin to look at these and deal with them if you don’t believe there’s anything else. You can never move into the feeling of personal power until you recognize truly that there’s a peaceful place within you that is already there, that doesn’t have to be fixed.”
Jordan and Margaret Paul

Some other quotations that express what I believe:

1.  “The closest thing to a cure for most forms of serious psychological suffering is a permanent change in the way one conducts one’s life–and the changes in feeling and self-concept that occur as part of that process.”                         Tom Rusk

2.  “We don’t want to feel helpless, so we use fear, anger, addiction, or unbridled sexuality to block out our helpless feelings. The fact is that if we cannot openly face our feeling of helplessness, we cannot receive help. It is important that we accept our helplessness, taking it to God and allowing Him to be strong where we are weak. When we let Him be God, we receive continuous healing for our woundedness. But when we hide our pain, helplessness, and insecurity, we find ourselves at the mercy of our narcissistic, wounded false self with its insatiable craving for validation and anesthesia.”
David Allen          Shattering the Gods Within

3.  “People spend a lifetime searching for happiness; looking for peace. They chase idle dreams, addictions, religions, even other people, hoping to fill the emptiness that plagues them. The irony is the only place they ever needed to search was within.”  Ramona Anderson

4.  “Treat your mind like a bad neighborhood – don’t go there alone.”
Anonymous

5.  “For many, negative thinking is a habit, which over time, becomes an addiction… A lot of people suffer from this disease because negative thinking is addictive to each of the Big Three — the mind, the body, and the emotions. If one doesn’t get you, the others are waiting in the wings.”                          Peter McWilliams

“This, I believe, is the great truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will come out of our experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else’s.” Joseph Campbell

“Our society considers hard work, intense recreation, vigorous exercise, rushing through the day, excessive eating, frquent anger, occasional deep depression, and sex without love as “normal”, and we have become addicted to the brain chemicals that accompany these so-called normal behaviors.” Paul Pearson

“I am convinced that knowledge and action are frequently synonymous, identical in the Socratic fashion. Where we know fully and completely, suitable action follows automatically and reflexively. Choices are made without conflict.” Abrahan Maslow

“We don’t receive wisdom, we must discover it for our­selves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.” Marcel Proust

“In our lives we are faced with a set of core issues that resurface again and again in different settings, with different people, at different times. These issues involve our relationship with the world, with ourselves, with our Higher Power. These are our life lessons. Stephanie Covington and Liana Beckett