"Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations……" — Mark Epstein
"Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a fear of it. Desire takes one out of oneself, into the possibility or relationship, but it also takes one deeper into oneself. Anxiety turns one back on oneself, but only onto the self that is already known."
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Mark Epstein
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26 Quotes by Mark Epstein
Mark Epstein has 26 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
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Uncovering your real desires can be terrifying. It can also set you spectacularly free.
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While the primary function of formal Buddhist meditation is to create the possibility of the experience of "being," my work…
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Buddhism teaches us that happiness does not come from any kind of acquisitiveness, be it material or psychological. Happiness comes…
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When we seek happiness through accumulation, either outside of ourselves-from other people, relationships, or material goods-or from our own self-development,…
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Desire is a teacher: When we immerse ourselves in it without guilt, shame, or clinging, it can show us something…
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If things do not exist as fixed, independent entities, then how can they die? Our notion of death as the…
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To be free, to come to terms with our lives, we have to have a direct experience of ourselves as…
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To free desire from the tendency to cling, we have to be willing to stumble over ourselves.
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In building a path through the self to the far shore of awareness, we have to carefully pick our way…
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The picture we present to ourselves of who we think we ought to be obscures who we really are.
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Depressed people think they know themselves, but maybe they only know depression.
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We are looking for a way to feel more real, but we do not realize that to feel more real…
See all 26 quotes by Mark Epstein »
More Already Known Quotes
This quote is filed under Already Known Quotes,
one of 22 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
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For [Richard] Feynman, the essence of the scientific imagination was a powerful and almost painful rule. What scientists create must…
— James Gleick
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Our confused wish finds expression in the confused question as to the nature of force and electricity. But the answer…
— Heinrich Hertz
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The law of the conservation of energy is already known, viz. that the sum of the actual and potential energies…
— Unknown Author
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And if I really can see the future, then what does it mean? Is there any sense in our lives…
— Marcus Sedgwick
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Already known as one of America’s best and wittiest poets, William Trowbridge has, in Ship of Fool, found the perfect…
— Charles Harper Webb
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Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we…
— William Blake
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Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what is already known? Or should we try to develop…
— Jean Piaget
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If only a small fraction of what is already known about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in…
— John Yudkin
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What art should do, I think, is advance the generation into the next era. It should be one step ahead…
— Andy Couturier
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An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call…
— Henri Bergson
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Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The…
— Susan Sontag
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For in 1900 all electromagnetic radiation of longer wavelengths was already known at least to the extent that one could…
— Max von Laue
See all 22 Already Known Quotes »