Ivan Ilych: "Halftime" revelation

 “It occurred to him that he had not spent his life as he should have done. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false.” 

― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

Greatest Problems in Life ...

 "The greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally unsolvable.  They can never be solved, but only outgrown." - Carl Jung

Healing Through Relationship

"All emotional and spiritual healing comes through relationship. This truth can be an obstacle to healing because the very thing that heals us (relationship) is the thing that previously wounded us. This paradox can lead us to defend against taking ownership of pain. We fear that our hearts will be wounded again. We escape pain by defending against the possibility of its recurrence.” 

― Chip Dodd, The Voice of the Heart

The final aim of life is placed beyond life.

"In ages of faith, the final aim of life is placed beyond life. The men of such ages are therefore used naturally and, as it were, involuntarily, to fix their gaze for many years on a static object toward which their progress is ever directed, and they learn by imperceptible degrees to repress a thousand small passing desires so as to satisfy more effectively this one great permanent longing which torments them. When these same men wish to concentrate upon worldly affairs, these habits come into their own. They readily settle upon one general and sure goal as an object for their actions here below and direct all their efforts toward it. You do not see them indulging in new projects every day but they do have definite plans which they never tire of pursuing.

This explains why religious nations have often achieved such lasting results. They discovered the secret of success in this world by concentrating upon the next." --  Alexis de Tocqueville

Excellence

 "We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit."  -- Aristotle

Excellent Sheep

"The ability to engage in introspection, I suggested, is the essential precondition for living the life of the mind, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude.  My students took this in for a second -- introspection, solitude, the life of the mind, things they probably had not been asked to think about before -- then one of them said, with a dawning sense of self-awareness, 'So are you saying that we're all just, like, really excellent sheep?''  -- From Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz

Education for All Ages

"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.  Anyone who keeps learning stays young.  The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young." - Henry Ford