A list of books I've recently read. Each link contains quotes from the book and my personal notes, along with a vocabulary section I use to improve my spoken and written word.
The Death of Education
Neil Postman, 1995
Because we are imperfect souls, our knowledge is imperfect. The history of learning is an adventure in overcoming our errors. There is no sin in being wrong. The sin is in our unwillingness to examine our own beliefs, and in believing that our authorities cannot be wrong.
The Denial of Death
Ernest Becker, 1974
The basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death. Human beings are naturally anxious because we are ultimately helpless and abandoned in a world where we are fated to die. “This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression – and with all this yet to die.”
Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology
Marie-Louise von Franz, 1959
Philosophically speaking, you cannot relate without projection, but there is a subjective feeling status in which you sometimes fell that your projection fits, and that there is no need to change it, and another status in which you feel uneasy, thinking that it ought to be corrected. But no projection is ever corrected without such a feeling of uneasiness.
The Story of My Life
Hellen Keller, 1903
Any teacher can take a child to the classroom, but not every teacher can make him learn. He will not work joyously unless he feels that liberty is his, whether he is busy or at rest; he must feel the flush of victory and the heart-sinking of disappointment before he takes with a will the tasks distasteful to him and resolves to dance his way bravely through a dull routine of textbooks.