Book of Life related quotes, I

One method of self-analysis is autobiographical. By this I mean pondering own personal history beginning from childhood and ending in evaluation on development of one's future. This method is used to try to get an understanding of self; important occasions, previous fears, hopes, disappointments and experiences that have shaked one's belief and trust in oneself and in others.

We ask from ourselves: Who am I depending on? What are my worst fears? Who I was "destined" to be at my birth? What have been my goals and how they have changed? What have been crossroad points of my life, where I have chosen the wrong direction? To what efforts I have dedicated myself to fix the mistakes and to return to the right path? Who am I now and who I would have become if I would have always made the right decisions and avoided mistakes?

Who I wanted to be earlier, who I want to be now and in the future? What kind of picture I have of myself? What kind of picture others should have of me? How these pictures differ from each other and of what I really feel myself to be? Who I will become if I continue to live as I have lived previously? What conditions have been effecting or dictating my development thus far? What kind of alternatives I have for my development? What I should do in order to make my choices on my future to come true?

This autobiographical study should not be theorizing with abstract psychoanalytical structures, but it should stay on the level of "seeing", feeling and of imagination on the level of experiencing, where theoretical thinking is kept at minimum.

- Erich Fromm

The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witness of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch.

- C.G. Jung

Remember, you cannot change what you do not acknowledge.

- Phillip C. McGraw