Richard Rosen Quotes & Sayings

If anything characterizes the cultural life of the seventies in America, it is an insistence on preventing failures of communication. — Richard Rosen

The first, sickness (vyadhi), is a physical obstacle, but the other eight can be considered mental. These include languor (styana), doubt (samshaya), heedlessness (pramada), sloth (alasya), dissipation (avirati), false vision (bhranti-darshana), nonattainment of yogic states (alabdha-bhumikatva), and instability in these states (anavasthitatva). — Richard Rosen

Anything is possible, but only a few things actually happen. — Richard Rosen

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out. — Richard Rosen

It's apparent that we can't proceed any further without a name for this institutionalized garrulousness, this psychological patter, this need to catalogue the ego's condition. Let's call it psychobabble, this spirit which now tyrannizes conversation in the seventies. — Richard Rosen

Psychobabble is ... a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it pretends to promote. It's an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations, that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems. — Richard Rosen

Some students are in a hurry to begin "real" pranayama. They go right to the later stages without first laying a quality foundation, and their practice often suffers. First find out what is. This is also part of the answer to the question Who am I? — Richard Rosen

The more the development of late capitalism renders obsolete or at least suspect the real possibilities of self, self-fulfillment and actualization, the more they are emphasized as if they could spring to life through an act of will alone. — Richard Rosen

If we ever do end up acting just like rats or Pavlov's dogs, it will be largely because behaviorism has conditioned us to do so. — Richard Rosen