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Midlife: A Philosophical Guide QUOTES

Midlife: A Philosophical Guide QUOTES

1 " The way in which you relate to the activities that matter most to you is by trying to complete them and so expel them from your life. Your days are devoted to ending, one by one, the activities that give them meaning. "

― , Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

2 " We can escape the self-destructive cycle of pursuit, resolution, and renewal, of attainments archived or unachieved. The way out is to find sufficient value in atelic activities, activities that have no point of conclusion or limit, ones whose fulfilment lies in the moment of action itself. To draw meaning from such activities is to live in the present - at least in one sense of that loaded phrase - and so to free oneself from the tyranny projects that plateau us around midlife. "

― , Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

3 " When the demands of life are pressing, too urgent to be ignored, it would be a mistake to devote all day to contemplation, reading Wordsworth, or playing golf. Being mortal, think of mortal things. Yet if you lose touch with existential value, if you find no place in your life for the activities of the gods - ones that make life worth living to begin with- you risk a midlife crisis not unlike John Stuart Mill's. "

― , Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

4 " In philosophers' terms, the shift in perspective is not temporal, but "epistemic": it has to do with knowledge. Emotionally, there is a fundamental difference between knowing that I will miss out on something good and knowing what, knowing that I won't achieve all my ambitions and knowing which. "

― , Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

5 " the feeling of stillness after a life of too much motion, such as sailors experience when they walk on dry land after too long at sea, "

― , Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

6 " representations of the midlife crisis precede its naming in 1965, how far can we trace the thing itself? It comes as a surprise to learn that Jaques’s examples are largely drawn not from his clinical practice but from the lives of creative artists. He was struck by the frequency with which the age of thirty-seven, or thereabouts, brings either creative silence or transformation. "

― , Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

7 " The method of proleptic nostalgia: imagine how would you will feel about the face in the mirror, the body you inhabit today, when you look back from ten or twenty years. It could and will become worse. "

― , Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

8 " the feeling of stillness after a life of too much motion, such as sailors experience when they walk on dry land after too long at sea, but "

― , Midlife: A Philosophical Guide