2025.11.29 – Quiet Strength and Wise Courage

Recommended YouTube video: The psychology of self-motivation – TEDx Talks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sxpKhIbr0E

91. “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”
    Confucius
    Born: about 28 September 551 BCE, Lu state (in today’s China)
    Died: 479 BCE
    Age at death: about 72 years
    Main role: Teacher and philosopher
    Cause of death / Health: Traditional accounts say he died of old age (natural causes).
92. “Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”
    Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger)
    Born: about 4 BCE, Corduba, Roman Hispania (today Córdoba, Spain)
    Died: 65 CE
    Age at death: about 68 years
    Main role: Stoic philosopher, writer, political advisor
    Cause of death / Health: Forced to take his own life on the orders of Emperor Nero, after being accused of taking part in a plot against him.
93. “It is not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”
    Epictetus
    Born: about 55 CE, Hierapolis, Phrygia (in today’s Turkey)
    Died: about 135 CE
    Age at death: about 80 years
    Main role: Stoic philosopher and teacher
    Cause of death / Health: Exact cause unknown; ancient sources suggest he died of natural causes at an old age.
94. “The wound is the place where the light enters you.”
    Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī
    Born: 30 September 1207, Balkh (in today’s Afghanistan or possibly Tajikistan)
    Died: 17 December 1273
    Age at death: about 66 years
    Main role: Poet and spiritual teacher
    Cause of death / Health: Historical sources say he died after an illness, likely from natural causes.
95. “Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.”
    Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha, traditional dating)
    Born: about 563 BCE, Lumbini (in today’s Nepal)
    Died: about 483 BCE, Kushinagar (in today’s India)
    Age at death: about 80 years
    Main role: Religious teacher, founder of Buddhism
    Cause of death / Health: Traditional texts say he became ill after a meal and died from natural causes linked to old age and sickness.
96. “Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”
    William James
    Born: 11 January 1842, New York City, United States
    Died: 26 August 1910
    Age at death: 68 years
    Main role: Philosopher and psychologist
    Cause of death / Health: Died from heart problems (heart disease) after a long illness.
97. “Every great dream begins with a dreamer.”
    Harriet Tubman
    Born: about March 1822, Dorchester County, Maryland, United States (exact date unknown)
    Died: 10 March 1913
    Age at death: about 90–91 years (birth date uncertain)
    Main role: Abolitionist, freedom fighter, guide on the Underground Railroad
    Cause of death / Health: Died of pneumonia and complications of old age.
98. “It’s the little things citizens do. That’s what will make the difference.”
    Wangari Maathai
    Born: 1 April 1940, near Nyeri, Kenya
    Died: 25 September 2011
    Age at death: 71 years
    Main role: Environmental activist, founder of the Green Belt Movement
    Cause of death / Health: Died from complications of ovarian cancer.
99. “I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.”
    Mary Wollstonecraft
    Born: 27 April 1759, London, England
    Died: 10 September 1797
    Age at death: 38 years
    Main role: Writer and early feminist thinker
    Cause of death / Health: Died from infection (puerperal fever) shortly after giving birth.
100. “Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.”
     Jonas Salk
     Born: 28 October 1914, New York City, United States
     Died: 23 June 1995
     Age at death: 80 years
     Main role: Medical researcher, developer of the first successful polio vaccine
     Cause of death / Health: Died from heart failure.

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Short answers

1) What is a “watchmaker”?
A watchmaker is a person who makes, designs, or repairs watches and sometimes clocks. It is a skilled craft job that needs very careful, precise work.

2) What is a “playwright”?
A playwright is a person who writes plays for the theatre. They create the story, the dialogue, and the characters that actors perform on stage.

3) What is a “philologist”?
A philologist is a scholar who studies language in written texts. They look at how languages change over time, how old manuscripts are written, and what words meant in the past.

4) Edith Eger’s psychology
Edith Eger is a clinical psychologist and Holocaust survivor. She writes and speaks a lot about trauma, freedom, and choice.

Very simple picture of her approach:

• She believes we cannot change the past, but we can change how we relate to it.
• She says we always have some choice in how we answer pain, even in very hard situations.
• She helps people move from “victim” (something was done to me) to “survivor” (I am choosing how I live now).
• She often uses ideas close to existential therapy and logotherapy.

Existential therapy (psychological line):
This is a type of therapy that focuses on big questions of life: death, freedom, meaning, loneliness. It says:

• We are free and also responsible for our choices.
• Life does not give us a ready-made meaning; we must create our own meaning.
• Suffering is part of life, but we can respond to it in a way that fits our values.

Logotherapy (psychological line, Viktor Frankl):
Logotherapy is a kind of existential therapy that puts meaning in the center. It says:

• People can bear great pain if they find a “why” (a reason) to live.
• Therapists help people discover meaning in work, in love, and in how they face suffering.

Edith Eger uses these ideas to say: “You cannot change what happened. But you can decide what you do now.”

5) The philosophy of absurdism (very simple)
Absurdism is a philosophy linked especially to Albert Camus. In simple words:

• Humans deeply want life to have clear meaning and order.
• The universe seems silent and indifferent; it does not give us a clear answer.
• The clash between our need for meaning and the silent world is called the absurd.

Camus says we have three possible answers:

1. Give up on life (suicide) – he says this is not the right answer.
2. Close our eyes and believe some story without question (a “leap of faith” that hides the tension).
3. Stay with the absurd and still live, create, love, and fight for justice anyway.

For Camus, the third choice is the healthy one: we accept that life is not simple, but we keep living with courage and honesty.

6) Possible reasons for Primo Levi’s suicide (careful, sensitive topic)
Primo Levi was a writer, a chemist, and a survivor of Auschwitz. In 1987 he died after falling down the stairwell of his apartment building. The coroner in Italy ruled his death a suicide, but some people think it might have been an accident. We cannot know with certainty.

People who believe it was suicide suggest several possible factors:

• He had symptoms of depression in the years before his death.
• He was caring for his very sick mother and mother-in-law, which was heavy and stressful.
• Some writers say he suffered from “survivor guilt” and deep sadness related to the Holocaust, even if he sometimes said his depression was not directly about Auschwitz.

Important point: these are interpretations by biographers and scholars. Levi himself did not leave a clear note explaining his reasons.

7) Analytic psychology
Analytic psychology is the psychological line started by Carl Gustav Jung. Simple description:

• It speaks about the personal unconscious (your own forgotten or pushed-down material) and the collective unconscious (deep patterns shared by humanity, called archetypes).
• It looks at symbols and images from dreams, myths, religion, and art.
• A main goal is individuation: becoming a more whole, balanced person by integrating different parts of yourself (for example, reason and feeling, conscious and unconscious).

8) Individual psychology
Individual psychology is the psychological line created by Alfred Adler. Simple description:

• It says humans often feel small or “less than” (feelings of inferiority). These feelings can push us to grow or to act in unhealthy ways.
• It stresses social interest: we are healthiest when we care about others and feel we belong to our community.
• Problems often come when people try to feel “superior” rather than connected and useful.

9) Feminist psychology
Feminist psychology is a psychological line that:

• Studies how gender roles, power, and social structures affect thoughts, feelings, and mental health.
• Points out that many old theories were built mostly from men’s experience and often ignored women and other marginalized groups.
• Tries to make therapy more equal: the therapist and client work together; the therapist is not a “boss.”
• Connects personal problems with social issues (for example, violence, discrimination, unfair pay).

10) Developmental psychology
Developmental psychology is a psychological line that:

• Studies how people grow and change across life: from baby to child, teenager, adult, and older age.
• Looks at changes in thinking, emotion, language, relationships, and moral values.
• Helps us understand, for example, how children learn to speak, how teenagers build identity, and how aging affects memory.

11) “Learning theorist” and learning theory
A learning theorist is a psychologist or researcher who studies how learning happens.

Learning theory (psychological line) includes different approaches, such as:

• Behavioural theories: say learning is mainly about associations and consequences (reward, punishment, repetition).
• Social learning theory: says we also learn by watching others, not only from direct rewards.
• Cognitive learning theories: say learning also involves attention, memory, and thinking.

A learning theorist might design experiments about how people or animals form habits, how students learn better, or how fear is learned and unlearned.

12) “All real living is meeting.” – what does this mean?
This sentence comes from Martin Buber. In simple words:

• We are most fully alive when we meet other people in a deep, honest way.
• Not “using” them, not just talking about roles and functions, but really seeing them as a full person.
• When two people meet like this, each one is changed a little. Life becomes more real, not just routine.

So “all real living is meeting” means: the quality of your life is strongly shaped by the quality of your relationships and your genuine encounters with others.

13) Edith Eger:

• Edith Eva Eger was born on 29 September 1927 in Košice.
• At that time the city’s political status changed several times (Czechoslovakia, then under Hungarian rule).
• She later moved to the United States, where she became an American psychologist.

14) Short descriptions of some psychological lines (summary)
Here is a compact recap:

• Existential therapy: focuses on freedom, responsibility, meaning, and facing the facts of life (death, limits, loneliness) to build an authentic life.
• Logotherapy: a type of existential therapy that puts “meaning” at the center. People heal by finding purpose even in suffering.
• Analytic psychology: Jung’s school; works with the personal and collective unconscious, archetypes, dreams, and the process of individuation.
• Individual psychology: Adler’s school; looks at feelings of inferiority, the drive to belong, and the importance of social interest.
• Feminist psychology: studies how gender and power affect mental life; wants more equal, socially aware therapy.
• Developmental psychology: studies changes across the lifespan in thinking, feeling, and behaviour.
• Learning theory / learning theorist: studies how learning happens through experience, observation, and cognition.

15) Daniel Kahneman – 10 verified quotes
(All short, from his well-known work on thinking and decision-making.)

1. “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”
2. “We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.”
3. “What you see is all there is.”
4. “We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”
5. “Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
6. “The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct.”
7. “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” (He repeats this idea in different forms.)
8. “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”
9. “It is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.”
10. “The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.”

16) Daniel Kahneman – biography

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”
Daniel Kahneman
Born: 5 March 1934, Tel Aviv, British Mandate of Palestine (later Israel).
Died: 27 March 2024, Nunningen, Switzerland
Age at death: 90 years
Main role: Psychologist and behavioural economist; Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences
Cause of death / Health: Voluntary assisted death in Switzerland after cognitive decline related to dementia, using a legal assisted-dying organization.

17) Daniel Kahneman died in March 2024, at age 90.

His last major book was:

• Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (2021), written with Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein.

Reception compared with Thinking, Fast and Slow:

• Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) became a very famous, widely read book. It is often seen as a modern classic in psychology and behavioural economics, with very strong public and academic reception.
• Noise also received many positive reviews. Critics said it is deep, well-researched, and important for understanding errors in judgment, especially in groups and institutions.
• At the same time, some reviewers said Noise is more technical, long, and less “fun to read” than Thinking, Fast and Slow. It focuses on a more narrow topic (random variability in judgments), so it did not become as popular with the general public.
  In short: respected and valued, but not as loved or famous as Thinking, Fast and Slow.

18) Daniel Kahneman – children and their professions
From public sources:

• With his first wife, Irah (an educational psychologist), he had two children:
• A son, Michael (sometimes also named in sources as Steven Michael), who has studied economics and worked in fields related to economics and finance. He has also written about living with schizophrenia.
• A daughter, Lenore Shoham, who works in technology and life-science businesses, including leadership roles (for example, CEO and strategy positions) in start-up companies.

He also had two stepdaughters from the family of his second wife, the psychologist Anne Treisman.

19) Does Daniel Goleman continue working?
From current public information, Daniel Goleman (author of Emotional Intelligence) is alive and continues to be active as a writer and speaker, although at an older age his level of activity is naturally lower than in the past.