The book of life, Should we work on ourselves or on the world?

We should at points be ready to make a frank admission that life is collectively rather than just personally difficult, for reasons that extend into the political, ideological and existential spheres.

Our solutions must therefore stretch beyond pills to encompass an acknowledgement of a range of species-wide challenges. We shouldn’t just work on ourselves for not being well; in certain areas, we need also to work on the world for making us so.

David Bohm, On creativity

If one is serious about being original and creative, it is necessary for him first to be original and creative about reactions that are making him mediocre and mechanical.

Then eventually the natural creative action of the mind may fully awaken, so that it will start to operate in a basically new order that is no longer determined mainly by the mechanical aspects of thought… 

Just as the health of the body demands that we breathe properly, so, whether we like it or not, the health of the mind requires that we be creative.

[…]

But, of course, to awaken the creative state of mind is not at all easy. On the contrary, it is one of the most difficult things that could possibly be attempted. Nevertheless, for the reasons that I have given, I feel that it is for each of us individually and for society as a whole the most important thing to be done in the circumstances in which humanity now finds itself.

Alain De Botton, The course of love

How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right — in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable — given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearnt.

We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration.