john gray

“Books can inspire you to love yourself more, but by listening to, writing out, or verbally expressing your feelings you are actually doing it.”

“If there is anything unique about the human animal, it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience.”

“Anyone who truly wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places. Instead of fleeing to desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will d better to seek out the company of other animals. A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery.”

“Long after the traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up.The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.”

“Today we have made a fetish of choice; but a chosen death is forbidden. Perhaps what distinguishes humans from other animals is that humans have learnt to cling more abjectly to life.”

“Tragedy is born of myth, not morality. Prometheus and Icarus are tragic heroes. Yet none of the myths in which they appear has anything to do with moral dilemmas. Nor have the greatest Greek tragedies. If Euripides is the most tragic of the Greek playwrights, it is not because he deals with moral conflicts but because he understood that reason cannot be the guide of life.”

“The calls of birds and the traces left by wolves to mark off their territories are no less forms of language than the sings of humans. What is distinctively human is not the capacity for language. It is the crystallisation of language in writing.”

“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him,' the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said. 'It's clear that Wittgenstein hadn't spent much time with lions,' commented the gambler and conservationist John Aspinall.”

“If you believe that humans are animals, there can be no such thing as the history of humanity, only the lives of particular humans. If we speak of the history of the species at all, it is only to signify the unknowable sum of these lives. As with other animals, some lives are happy, others wretched. None has a meaning that lies beyond itself.”

“Life was indeed cruel; but it was better to glorify the Will than deny it.”

“always thought of myself as a loving person. But she was right. I had been a fair-weather friend. As long as she was happy and nice, I loved back. But if she was unhappy or upset, I would feel blamed and then argue or distance myself”

“I would love you all the day, every night we would kiss and play, if with me you'd fondly stray, over the hills and far away.”

“If we are to feel the positive feelings of love, happiness, trust, and gratitude, we periodically also have to feel anger, sadness, fear, and sorrow.”

“when man and women are able to respect and accept there differences the love has a chance to blossom”

“It is not what we say that hurts but how we say it.”

“Humanism is not science, but religion - the post-Christian faith that humans can make a world better than any in which they have so far lived. In pre-Christian Europe is was taken for granted that the future would be like the past. Knowledge and invention might advance, but ethics would remain much the same. History was a series of cycles, with no overall meaning. Against this pagan view, Christians understood history as a story of sin and redemption. Humanism is the transformation of this Christian doctrine of salvation into a project of universal human emancipation. The idea of progress is a secular version of the Christian belief in providence. That is why among the ancient pagans it was unknown.”

“Life is filled with rhythms-day and night, hot and cold, summer and winter, spring and fall, cloudy and clear. Likewise in a relationship, men and women have their own rhythms and cycles.”

“This catch-22 happens a lot to men. A man can sense that a woman wants to know if he loves her. He doesn't want to share those feelings because, if he does, she will expect him to marry her and be greatly hurt if he doesn't. In romantic movies, loving someone meant that you wanted to marry her. In real life, it is not always the case.”

“Not to be needed is a slow death for a man.”

“The good life is not found in dreams of progress,but in coping with tragic contingencies.We have been reared on religions and philosophies that deny the experience of tragedy.Can we imagine a life that is not founded on the consolations of action?Or are we too lax and coarse even to dream of living without them?”

“Love brings up our unresolved feelings . One day we are feeling loved , and the next day we are suddenly afraid to trust love .The painful memories of being rejected begin to surface when we are faced with trusting and accepting our partner's love .”

“Because she is afraid of not being supported, she unknowingly pushes away the support she needs.”

“If I seek to fulfill my own needs at the expense of my partner, we are sure to experience unhappiness, resentment, and conflict. The secret of forming a successful relationship is for both partners to win.”

“‎" when men and women are able to respect and accept their differences then love has a chance to blossom ”

“A common error of western commentators who seek to interpret Islamism sympathetically is to view it as a form of localised resistance to globalisation. In fact, Islamism is also a universalist political project. Along with Neoliberals and Marxists, Islamists are participants in a dispute about how the world as whole is to be governed. None is ready to entertain the possibility that it should always contain a diversity of regimes. On this point, they differ from non-western traditions of thinking in India, China and Japan, which are much more restrained in making universal claims.In their unshakeable faith that one way of living is best for all humankind, the chief protagonists in the dispute about political Islam belong to a way of thinking that is quintessentially western. As in Cold War times, we are led to believe we are locked in a clash of civilisations: the West against the rest. In truth, the ideologues of political Islam are western voices, no less than Marx or Hayek. The struggle with radical Islam is yet another western family quarrel.”

“The fate of the Right in the late modern age is to destroy what remains of the past in a vain attempt to recover it.”

“In Europe and Japan, bourgeois life lingers on. In Britain and America it has become the stuff of theme parks. The middle class is a luxury capitalism can no longer afford.”

“Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals. At the same time they never cease trying to escape from what they imagine themselves to be. Their religions are attempts to be rid of a freedom they have never possessed. In the twentieth century, the utopias of Right and Left served the same function. Today, when politics is unconvincing even as entertainment, science has taken on the role of mankind's deliverer.”

“It is a strange fancy to suppose that science can bring reason to an irrational world, when all it can ever do is give another twist to a normal madness.”

“Get the love you deserve and gave your partner the love and support he deserves”

“we are unique individuals with unique experiences”

“Men are motivated when they feel needed while women are motivated when they feel cherished.”

“That love motivates you to cooperate, respect, appreciate, cherish, and admire that person.”

“To love someone is to acknowledge the goodness of who they are. Through loving a person we awaken their awareness of their own innate goodness. It is as though they cannot know how worthy they are until they look into the mirror of our love and see themselves.”

“humankind's presence on Earth is nothing but a cancer”

“Today, for the mass of humanity, science and technology embody 'miracle, mystery, and authority'. Science promises that the most ancient human fantasies will at last be realized. Sickness and ageing will be abolished; scarcity and poverty will be no more; the species will become immortal. Like Christianity in the past, the modern cult of science lives on the hope of miracles. But to think that science can transform the human lot is to believe in magic. Time retorts to the illusions of humanism with the reality: frail, deranged, undelivered humanity. Even as it enables poverty to be diminished and sickness to be alleviated, science will be used to refine tyranny and perfect the art of war.”

“We think our actions express our decisions. But in nearly all of our life, willing decides nothing. We cannot wake up or fall asleep, remember or forget our dreams, summon or banish our thoughts, by deciding to do so. When we greet someone on the street we just act, and there is no actor standing behind what we do. Our acts are end points in long sequences of unconscious responses. They arise from a structure of habits and skills that is almost infinitely complicated. Most of our life in enacted without conscious awareness. Nor can it be made conscious. No degree of self-awareness can make us self-transparent.”

“Most people today think they belong to a species that can be master of its destiny. This is faith, not science. We do not speak of a time when whales or gorillas will be masters of their destinies. Why then humans?”

“Global laissez-faire is not a conspiracy of corporate America. It is a tragedy - one of several that have occurred in the twentieth century - in which an hubristic ideology runs aground on enduring human needs that it has failed to comprehend.”

“When a man can listen to a woman's feelings without getting angry and frustrated, he gives her a wonderful gift.He makes it safe for her to express herself.The more she is able to express herself, the more she feels heard and understood, and the more she is able to give a man the loving trust, acceptance, appreciation, admiration, approval, and encouragement that he needs.”

“تتحدث النساء لنفس الاسباب التي يتوقف الرجال بسببها عن الكلام”

“Wanita senang hatinya bila mempunyai teman yang dapat berbagi kesulitannya. Lelaki senang hatinya bila dapat memecahkan kesulitannya sendirian di guanya.”

“Salah satu hal ajaib mengenai kehidupan.Saat muridnya siap, sang guru muncul.Saat pertanyaan diajukan, jawabannya datang.Saat kita benar-benar siap menerima, apa yang kita butuhkan akan tersedia.Ketika penduduk Venus siap menerima, orang-orang Mars siap memberi." (dikutip dari buku: Pria dari Mars, Wanita dari Venus)”

“Men feel cherished when they are needed. Women feel cherished when they are loved.Indonesian version (Bahasa):Kaum pria jadi termotivasi dan bersemangat kala mereka merasa dibutuhkan.Kaum wanita jadi termotivasi dan bersemangat kala mereka merasa dicintai.”