"the reflective character, the introvert, though certainly trying to deal with his unruly affects, is in reality more influenced by his passions than the man whose life is consciously guided by desires oriented to objects. The latter, the extravert, tries to get away with this all the time, but is forced to experience how his subjective thoughts and feelings constantly stand in his way. He is far more influenced by his psychic inner world than he suspects. He cannot see it himself, but the people around him, if observant, will always detect the personal purpose in his striving ". <...>.

"The other, the introvert, with his conscious thought-out intentions, always overlooks what the people around him see only too clearly, that his intentions are really subservient to powerful impulses, lacking both aim and object, and are in a high degree influenced by them."

"​The observer and critic of the extravert is liable to take the parade of thinking and feeling as a thin covering that only imperfectly conceals a cold and calculated personal aim. Whereas the man who tries to understand the introvert will readily conclude that vehement passions are only with difficulty held in check by apparent sophistries. "

Doubt is based on man's separation from the whole of reality, on his lack of universal participation, on the isolation of his individual self. <...>He flees from his freedom of asking and answering for himself to a situation in which no further questions can be asked and the answers to previous questions are imposed on him authoritatively. In order to avoid the risk of asking and doubting he surrenders the right to ask and to doubt. <...>. He "escapes from his freedom" (Fromm) in order to escape the anxiety of meaninglessness <...> Meaning is saved, but the self is sacrificed. And since the conquest of doubt was a matter of sacrifice, the sacrifice of the freedom of the self, it leaves a mark on the regained certitude: a fanatical self-assertiveness. Fanaticism is the correlate to spiritual self-surrender: it shows the anxiety which it was supposed to conquer, by attacking with disproportionate violence those who disagree and who demonstrate by their disagreement elements in the spiritual life of the fanatic which he must suppress In himself. Because he must suppress them in himself he must suppress them in others. The weakness of the fanatic is that those whom he fights have a secret hold upon him; and to this weakness he and his group finally succumb.
​
From The Courage to Be

She can get a chair; she can sit down and write. Facing the blank page. The blank page also faces her with freedom.
<...>
Stand with the woman by the table. Sit with the woman facing the blank page, or blank canvas. A space waiting for filling. These spaces are perfect. What is perfect terrifies.
<...>
The steam of tension evaporated. The moment passed. The fear, buried. It is easier like this. It is ordinary and safe. We hurry to fill in spaces with everydayness because spaces frighten us, but, the dividing line between fear and excitemnet is thin.
<...>
In bardic times, it was considered a great misfortune to have a poet in your family. But if the poet happened to be a woman, this was double misfortune, for she, as a woman, would have double the power. ... Magic surrounded the poet's power and this power was feared.

- I used him, but, you know, I paid for it, in not being known by him.
-And as for that - passion - I was so estranged from it that I could hardly remember what appetite was like or what confidence was like that would let it show.

- ... you do gain a small distance from anything by keeping it in suspension in your mind while you work on finding the words to fit it. I think this is interesting because you also lose sight if you ruminate on something in your head all the time. The difference is in one case your producing something and in the other your are sort of stuck in thought cycle. 

Crow realized God loved him --
Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.
So that was proved.
Crow reclined, marvelling, on his heart-beat.

And he realized that God spoke Crow --
Just existing was His revelation.

But what
Loved the stones and spoke stone?
They seemed to exist too.
And what spoke that strange silence
After his clamour of caws faded?

And what loved the shot-pellets
That dribbled from those strung up mummifying crows?

What spoke the silence of lead?

Crow realized there were two Gods --

One of them much bigger than the other
Loving his enemies
And having all the weapons.

God tried to teach Crow how to talk.
"Love," said God. "Say, Love."
Crow gaped, and the white shark crashed into the sea
And went rolling downwards, discovering its own depth.

"No, no," said God. "Say Love. Now try it. Love."
Crow gaped, and a bluefly, a tsetse, a mosquito
Zoomed out and down
To their sundry flesh-pots.

"A final try," said God. "Now, Love."
Crow convulsed, gaped, retched and
Man's bodiless prodigious head
Bulbed out onto the earth, with swivelling eyes,
Jabbering protest --

And Crow retched again, before God could stop him.
And woman's vulva dropped over man's neck and tightened.
The two struggled together on the grass.
God struggled to part them, cursed, wept --

Crow flew guiltily off.

XLVI

A THOUGHT went up my mind to-day
That I have had before,
But did not finish,—some way back,
I could not fix the year,
  
Nor where it went, nor why it came        
The second time to me,
Nor definitely what it was,
Have I the art to say.
  
But somewhere in my soul, I know
I ’ve met the thing before; 
It just reminded me—’t was all--
And came my way no more.

From Emily Dickinson (1830–86).  Complete Poems.  1924

Dickinson's poem about power of words - click "read more":​

Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst, MA

There is a world out there and around us and then there is what we make of it. Words help navigate through the world by means of letting us name objects/events and in doing so face them. Experiencing something and being able to say  "this is [insert word]" is like dropping an anchor, like tying yourself to the world, like building a bridge. People often don't agree on what a word means : what's funny for one person might not be funny for somebody else. The mismatch, albeit confusing at times, also helps us make sense of the world -- helps notice differences , similarities, all sorts of interesting effects.

I like the idea of this secondary personal world that has the features of the actual world, yet different from it and unique. It's singularity arising not only from the unique combination of events/places one has encountered but also from the words that this person chooses to refer to them (= from the way he/she relates to those events).

This quote from The Joke by Milan Kundera led me to thinking that the personal world of words is not the only secondary world possible:
"Once more I was amazed by the incredible human capacity for transforming reality into a likeness of desires or ideas".

Positive liberty vs. Negative liberty
​
Positive liberty is a proactive process, springing from the need of individuals to feel as if they are in control of their decisions. One of the effects of posivite liberty is that people may feel they are more in control than they really are.

Negative liberty is the absence of meddling in one's individual decisions : "by being free in this sense I mean not being interfered with by others". Interesting side note: ideal Romantic artist is the embodiment of heroic individual negative liberty. 

(from  Isaiah Berlin,  Four Essays on Liberty , 1969)

​That means that every moment events are so freshly
invented,
so newly born,
that it has almost no history in the piece itself
but its own actual presence.
 
Wolpe's distortion can be heard as a attempt to re-create the experience of  Beethoven's contemporaries when they first heard the Fifth, to conjure up a time when the work's course was still unforeseeable . "

(from The FIrst Four Notes by Matthew Guerrieri, 2012)

​A quote from The Confessions of St. Augustine.

Not one whit more easily are the words learnt for all this vileness; but by their means the vileness is committed with less shame. Not that I blame the words, being, as it were, choice and precious vessels; but that wine of error which is drunk to us in them by intoxicated teachers; and if we, too, drink not, we are beaten, and have no sober judge to whom we may appeal.