Mansion House Counselling Practice

Happiness depends upon ourselves
Aristotle

Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit
Aristotle

Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet
Aristotle

He who has overcome his fears will truly be free
Aristotle

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance
Aristotle

The antidote for fifty enemies is one friend
Aristotle

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can

Arthur Ashe

Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer
Joseph Campbell

We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us
Joseph Campbell

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek
Joseph Campbell

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive
Joseph Campbell

If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path
Joseph Campbell

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths
Joseph Campbell

All religions are true but none are literal
Joseph Campbell

We're not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalises
Joseph Campbell

All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you
Joseph Campbell

Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold
Joseph Campbell

A bit of advice
Given to a young Native American
At the time of his initiation:
As you go the way of life,
You will see a great chasm. Jump.
It is not as wide as you think
Joseph Campbell

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are
E.E. Cummings

To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting
E.E. Cummings

Unless you love someone, nothing else makes sense
E.E. Cummings

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful
Sigmund Freud

Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility
Sigmund Freud

We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love
Sigmund Freud

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways
Sigmund Freud

Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength
Sigmund Freud

It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life
Sigmund Freud

Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me
Sigmund Freud

Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy
Sigmund Freud

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten
Neil Gaiman

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up
Neil Gaiman

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art - write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can
Neil Gaiman

Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly
Neil Gaiman

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not
Neil Gaiman

Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody... no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds...
Neil Gaiman

Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it
Neil Gaiman

So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before... whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life
Neil Gaiman

If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself
Martin Heidegger

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed
Carl Gustav Jung

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves
Carl Gustav Jung

Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes
Carl Gustav Jung

You are what you do, not what you say you'll do
Carl Gustav Jung

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible
Carl Gustav Jung

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people
Carl Gustav Jung

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate
Carl Gustav Jung

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong
Carl Gustav Jung

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism
Carl Gustav Jung

As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know
Carl Gustav Jung

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are
Carl Gustav Jung

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls
Carl Gustav Jung

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely
Carl Gustav Jung

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious
Carl Gustav Jung

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order
Carl Gustav Jung

Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not
Carl Gustav Jung

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being
Carl Gustav Jung

Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event
Carl Gustav Jung

Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling
Carl Gustav Jung

We cannot change anything unless we accept it
Carl Gustav Jung

Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge
Carl Gustav Jung

Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other
Carl Gustav Jung

No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell
Carl Gustav Jung

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards
Søren Kierkegaard

The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays
Søren Kierkegaard

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom
Søren Kierkegaard

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced
Søren Kierkegaard

The most common form of despair is not being who you are
Søren Kierkegaard

What labels me, negates me
Søren Kierkegaard

Love is the expression of the one who loves, not of the one who is loved. Those who think they can love only the people they prefer do not love at all. Love discovers truths about individuals that others cannot see
Søren Kierkegaard

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself
Søren Kierkegaard

Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are
Søren Kierkegaard

If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin
Søren Kierkegaard

It is only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth – and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up – that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

A false sense of security is the only kind there is
Michael Meade

When faced with great danger and when people panic and seek a false sense of safety, run towards the roaring and go where you fear to go. For only in facing your fears can you find some safety and a way through. When the world rattles and the end seems near, go towards the roar
Michael Meade

In the end, what we fear will not go away, for it indicates what we must go through in order to awaken, become more genuine, and live more fully. The problem is that we tend to be most afraid of what our own souls require of us. Often our deepest fear is that we might become who we are intended to be, who we already are at our core. For becoming who we truly are requires the greatest amount of change
Michael Meade

Over one's mind and over one's body the individual is sovereign
John Stuart Mill

The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it
John Stuart Mill

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven
John Milton

The first and wisest of them all professed
To know this only, that he nothing knew
John Milton

This horror will grow mild, this darkness light
John Milton

What is dark within me, illumine
John Milton

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music
Friedrich Nietzsche

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you
Friedrich Nietzsche

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist
Friedrich Nietzsche

You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star
Friedrich Nietzsche

Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed
Friedrich Nietzsche

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a difficult battle
Plato

Those who seek power are not worthy of that power
Plato

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors
Plato

No one is more hated than [s]he who speaks the truth
Plato

Don't force your children into your ways, for they were created for a time different from your own
Plato

To begin is the most important part of any quest and by far the most courageous
Plato

Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses
Plato

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it
Rumi

The wound is the place where the Light enters you
Rumi

Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion
Rumi

Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth
Rumi

silence is the language of god,
all else is poor translation
Rumi

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning
Jean-Paul Sartre

Freedom is what we do with what is done to us
Jean-Paul Sartre

It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it
Jean-Paul Sartre

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people
Arthur Schopenhauer

Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things
Arthur Schopenhauer

It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else
Arthur Schopenhauer

There is nothing more confining than the prison we don't know we are in
William Shakespeare

This above all: to thine own self be true
And it must follow, as the night the day
Thou canst not then be false to any man
William Shakespeare

The limits of my language means the limits of my world
Ludwig Wittgenstein

The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself
Ludwig Wittgenstein

If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done
Ludwig Wittgenstein

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Don’t, for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Every person must choose how much truth he can stand
Irvin D. Yalom

The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices
Irvin D. Yalom

To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another
Irvin D. Yalom

A curious thought experiment. . . Nietzsche's message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally
Irvin D. Yalom

Mature love is loving, not being loved
Irvin D. Yalom

I should have become an "I" before I became a "we"
Irvin D. Yalom

As long as he denies his own agency, real change is unlikely because his attention will be directed toward changing his environment rather than himself
Irvin D. Yalom

We cannot avoid this responsibility, this freedom
Irvin D. Yalom

keep in mind that therapy is a deep and comprehensive exploration into the course and meaning of one’s life; given the centrality of death in our existence, given that life and death are interdependent, how can we possibly ignore it?
Irvin D. Yalom