ANGELOS
MICHALOPOULOS
MICHALOPOULOS
Angelos Michalopoulos is a self-taught writer, sculptor and painter, whose main inspiration is human nature and the lessons derived from its study. Self-knowledge, relationships, conflict, the truth of who we are, and happiness are key themes of his art as seen in his books, sculptures and paintings. He views art as a generator of beautiful emotions and the most direct pathway to one’s soul. He also views ‘creation’ as the process by which he learns more about himself and others. During his study of human nature, he translates his answers into art and his art answers back with more questions, making his relationship with it a passionate and ever-evolving journey of self-knowledge and realisation. Hence, his goal as an artist is to generate beauty and happiness through a deeper understanding of one’s self.
Angelos Michalopoulos was born in 1962, He have been married to his wife since he was twenty two, he have five children and he likes to read his poems to his conscience before I begin to write them.
Seeing the ugliness, whatever form it takes - malice, misery, aggression, negativity - constantly defeating the happiness of the people around me and seeing how much useless misery is born in the world and how much useful happiness is wasted, I grabbed in my hand the most eager "why" I could find and started writing, in the chance that I can defeat ugliness by explaining it. I wanted to understand how we've become so good at being sad, how we've become so good at not only at abandoning the beauty of our soul but asking its ugliness to show the world around us who we are. Every time I struggled with the question of who gives birth to my misery, I stumbled upon my own weaknesses. By writing for others, I learned myself. Nothing is accidental, not even anything that seems to happen by accident. It is no coincidence that there is so much sadness in the world. It exists because, by choosing to do what is easy and not what is right, we don't try to learn our weaknesses as well as we should to prevent them from producing misery or magnifying the misery someone else's weaknesses have produced.
The more I wrote, the more I realized the value of the truth we should tell ourselves in achieving our happiness. Maybe it's time to say no to the lies we tell ourselves and finally tell the truth. This way, we will build self-knowledge, become as self-sufficient as we need to disarm our weaknesses and become happy. Every time we tell the truth to ourselves, we create self-knowledge and every time we lie, we tear it down. We all want to be happy, but we aren’t willing to do everything needed to deserve our happiness. Happiness is the disarming of misery. How can we feel happy though, when we aren't willing to defend our happiness from the onslaught of the ugliness of the world around us? How do we want to live a happy life when we fill it with ugliness? That's what we need to change. CALILO. Create a life you can fall in love with. However, the more we praise change, the more we remain the same, because we know that change often has more truth in it than we can bear. That's why we love to hide in the routine so much.
Life doesn't come with an instruction book. We have to write it ourselves, one mistake at a time. Self-knowledge is the mother of happiness. When we get to know ourselves, we will feel as strong as we need to be to disarm our weaknesses and therefore be able to create beauty by neutralizing the ugliness within us and the ugliness around us. In this way, we will be able to change our lives for the better. When we learn ourselves well enough to disarm our weaknesses, we will allow our strengths to make us as successful and happy as they can. We will therefore create a life that has as little ugliness as possible, a life that has so much beauty that we will want to fall in love with.
Let's tell ourselves the truth in order to drive away the ugliness we have been producing for so many years with our lies. The lies we tell ourselves create ugliness, which in turn, leads to misery. On the contrary, truth creates beauty that leads to happiness. We all have beauty in our souls, as long as we aren't afraid of the truth from which it is made.
Let's live by translating the beauty of our soul into happiness, and not by translating its ugliness into the pain and misery of the people around us. We will then be able to create a world that is as real as it needs to be to feel so beautiful that it overflows with happiness.
People who reach their destination are those who never abandon the place they started from.
Talk to everybody, hug many, but give your soul only to the few who will give you theirs.
LET US CELEBRATE HAPPINESS AND EXPLAIN SADNESS (UNTIL WE ARE NOT SAD ANYMORE)
Write more than you’ll erase, learn more than you’ll forget, build more than you’ll tear down, hope more than you’ll ...
Humanity’s biggest weapon against meanness is that you can’t hurt someone without hurting yourself. If I could change th...
Every day I learn how to think by forgetting what I already know. I learn how to be happy by ignoring all that wants to ...
Happiness is man’s greatest quest. Maybe that’s why a heart is made of two question marks facing each other.
At the end of every day the truth of who we are brings us the bill to pay for every word we said and every action we did during it. When we pay it in full, we see dreams at night and when we don’t, we see nightmares.
That’s why, everyday of my life, I threw in the garbage those last moments that found my body overflowing with brand new hugs, which I never found the emotional generosity to give to the people around me, and instead kept them locked inside me to become the questions my compassion would ask me the next day. Everyday of my life I threw in the garbage those last moments that reveal to my soul any part of its beauty that I failed to find enough kindness in me to defeat my ego and my greed, so that I could share it with the world around me.
Why be like lions living the life of cockroaches? We fail because the demands of greatness are huge and of failure, none. We are sad because the demands of happiness are great and of misery, none.
If we can become lions once in a while, why do we choose to live most of our lives like cockroaches? If we know what to do to be happier, why not do it more often? Why be like lions who choose to live like cockroaches? We live by throwing our strengths in the trash so that we won't feel compelled to give sweat, our sense of security and truth to become the person they can make us be. We are in danger. We are in danger of our mediocrity. We live by donating our strengths to our weaknesses. We donate them to the fear that comes with doing something intense that will result in a mistake, a defeat, and those weaknesses of ours that caused it. We praise what we want to avoid using, but often use heavily, what we don't particularly respect.
We glorify light because we know how much more convenient and effortless it is to spend large parts of our lives hiding in the dark. If we can be happy, kind and creative people once in a while, why don’t we be so more often? If we can be, once in a while, as true as our truth and as strong as our strength, why don’t we do so more often? Why are we so willing to surrender to the horrible grey, the appalling fog of our handmade apathy, cowardice and mediocrity, waiting for life to come and show us how kind, humane, strong and capable we could be? If we know how to feel intensely, why do we choose to spend big parts of our lives immersed in apathy and its best friend, boredom? If we can be as kind as we need to feel happy once in a while, why do we choose to be so mean that we end up being miserable? If we know how happy we become by living to the max, why do we choose to spend most of our time hiding in the minimal? If we can do it occasionally, why not do it more often?
We trust what we know, fear what we don’t and dread what we have intentionally left unknown. Self-knowledge is the mother of success and happiness. If we knew our weaknesses well enough to disarm them, we wouldn’t be afraid of them. We wouldn’t be afraid of doing something new, intense or extreme that would forcibly toss us onto our mistakes and defeats, that is, onto the truth of who we are, which our weaknesses are a great part of. Instead, we choose to spend a large part of our life hidden in the lies we use to convince ourselves that we have twice as many strengths and half as many weaknesses. When we get to discover our weaknesses, we will defeat the “once in a while" label we’ve installed in front of our brain and we will be able to be our best selves more often than we become our worst. So, let's stop covering up our weaknesses with the lies that we tell ourselves and let's start learning them. Let’s live our life exposing, as often as we can, the lies we’ve been telling ourselves for years, until we unmask those weaknesses of ours that produced them. When we get to know our weaknesses, we will stop being afraid of them, and will free ourselves enough to live our life to the max. We are lions that choose to live the biggest portion of our lives as cockroaches because the demands of greatness are huge and of failure, none.
Thankfully, there will never be a shortage of people who want to build a world where a smile defeats a swearword, where the truth of a “yes” defeats the hypocrisy and dishonesty of a “maybe”, and where the compassion out of which a caress is woven defeats the hypocrisy the most frightened parts of our worst-selves keep producing.
Yet we fear our weaknesses so much that we hesitate to show our beauty, so we end up constantly showing the parts of our character our ugliness wants to show. Let’s finally learn the truth of who we are and those weaknesses of ours that make up the ugliest and most painful part of us so that we stop fearing it. Let's create a life during which we defend the beauty of our soul without examining what we gain or lose by doing so. Let’s never betray our soul, no matter how many emotional and physical benefits our logic promises to give us.
I will live by doing my best to be as honest as my soul, because every time I stood to be as real as my truth, as emotionally solid as my soul and as pure as my beliefs, I realised what it meant to be so in love with your life, and so proud of who you are, that you don’t want to be anyone else, no matter how much more powerful, attractive and victorious you could become
I will live by doing everything I can to deserve my soul, refusing to betray the beliefs it is made of just so I can secure the tempting gains my logic never stops promising me. I have never felt happier in my life than during those times when I felt that I deserved my beliefs, having refused to betray them to achieve the easy victory promised to me by the most victorious yet dishonest thought I had in my mind at the time. I will believe so much in my beliefs that I will become so honest with myself that I won’t be able to be anything else but happy. When I manage to become as honest as my soul, I will feel as beautiful as her beauty.
Beauty is born to defeat the sadness that ugliness produces.
Waste of beauty is the most meaningless human endeavour. Let’s use our soul’s beauty to make our lives, and those of the people around us, more beautiful, and the power of our brain to help any ugliness we encounter explain to itself what makes it feel ugly until it discovers where it hid its beauty. Our life is paved, from end to end, with joy and sorrow. Let’s embrace our joys and let them free to roam our soul, painting her with their inexhaustible optimism, beauty and passion, and let’s explain our sorrows by discovering which weaknesses of ours gave birth to or magnified them.
Life is the celebration of beauty, but even more so, the celebration of an ugliness that was never born because it was explained. Every time we manage to explain to ourselves what makes us feel ugly, a celebration of beauty begins.
EREGO. Each of us is a revolution of good. Each of us can be a rebellion of beauty against global ugliness. So, let’s start fighting with all the means at our disposal to overturn negativity, turn sadness into happiness and illuminate any darkness that steals away our light until we convince it to no longer want to hide in its gloom.
The more we love, the less we fear. When we’re not afraid to love, we fear nothing.
Love adores those who have the courage to fight their hatred. Since love is the reward of courage, hatred is the reward of cowardice. Happiness decided to be the reward of emotional honesty thousands of years ago. It has never gone back on its word since. I will strive to be so emotionally honest that I won’t be able to become anything else but happy.
Liars have all it takes to be sad because, by fearing the truth, they end up fearing their own soul that produces it.
Consequently, they choose to keep as far away from their soul as needed to never find their happiness that lives within her. Self-knowledge is the mother of happiness. People who become happy are those who, having told the truth to themselves, know their weaknesses as well as needed to disarm them before they block the road that leads to their happiness. There’s nothing our weaknesses want less than for us to be happy because this way, they keep us as weak as they need to defeat us. Self-knowledge is the mother of happiness because we trust what we know and fear what we don’t. Our choice is to either get to know our weaknesses better or forget about our happiness. Our biggest fear, our alpha fear, is the unknown we create out of everything we choose to never learn. It’s the fear that gives birth to all other fears and the source of our most undefinable sadness. We fear the unknown every time it dresses up as the darkness around us, or the future ahead of us, tearing into our lives to show and prove to us how much stronger and more determined than us it is. The one unknown we are most terrified of is the part of our character we have intentionally left unknown. We fear what we don’t know and that’s why we haven't stopped learning, ever since childhood, to overcome our fears, the ones anything unknown around us engender. The less we know about something, the more we fear it.
We trust what we know, fear what we don’t, and dread what we’ve intentionally left unknown. The less we know about our weaknesses, the more we fear them, and the less confident we feel when dealing with any problem we face, which they create or magnify. As long as we choose to keep our weaknesses unknown, we live locked in a fortress contained by the fears of the unknown, blocked even from our own dreams and potential. We live in the fortress we’ve built from our knowledge, from all we have learned so far, seeing from afar the person we could become hugging our dreams and living freer and happier than us outside of it. Thankfully, we are much better than we think at defeating the things that want to make us miserable. We have many mental and emotional weapons and allies to defeat our weaknesses at our disposal and, by extension, defeat the misery they cause or magnify for us. To manage to do that, we should not be afraid to learn them as well as we need to disarm them before they lead us to the wrong decisions and the defeats that will fill us with sorrow, pain, disillusionment and low self-esteem.
Max most apogee. If only we knew our weaknesses better, we would enjoy life more - since we wouldn’t be afraid that, by showing who we truly are, by feeling or doing something as intense as the truth we are made of, we might produce a defeat that would throw us against those weaknesses of ours that spawned it. If we knew our weaknesses better, we wouldn't be so afraid to get close to ourselves, close to our truth, by feeling more and thinking less. The power of our soul will become our power, only when we believe in her. The more we believe in our soul, the stronger we become.
Happiness will go where truth already is.
To protect ourselves from what we shouldn’t know, we live by learning a lot and forgetting even more.
We live by mobilising our lies to constantly protect us from our own truth. With every passing day, our lives are filled with more unknown, no matter how good we are at fooling ourselves that we know more because we’ve learned so much. Instead of becoming the truth of who we are, we become the lie that, at any point, suits us better. As we grow older, to protect ourselves from the truth of who we are, we become better at erasing than at writing, better at forgetting than at learning, better at tearing down than at building, better at being afraid than at hoping. As we grow older, we become better at not letting reality remind us of who we could become and at avoiding doing things that might show us those capabilities of ours we hide behind our delusions. Not only do we not try to learn the unknown around us and turn it into knowledge, but we generate it ourselves. To protect ourselves from what we should never realise, we choose to forget more than we learn. The older we get, the better we become at forgetting than learning, for we become better at protecting ourselves from what threatens our own lies. We choose to forget everything that threatens the lies we tell ourselves rather than learn what is committed to support our truth.
We live surrendering our happiness to the unknown. To protect our delusions from the truth, and our ego from its next rendezvous with defeat, we continuously get better at producing the unknown by forgetting what we know, or not realising what we’ve learned, instead of demolishing it by learning it.
Darkness can be so convenient! We rarely go anywhere without our handmade darkness. It’s the darkness we manufacture ourselves so that we can hide from everything the light wants to reveal! We create handmade darkness out of all we don’t want to learn, all we've learnt but don’t want to realise, and all we intentionally forget. By forgetting what we know, or not realising what we’ve learnt, we manage to turn, in seconds, our knowledge into ignorance, thus acquitting ourselves of the possible defeat in the battle before us, or offering us an excuse to not even try to fight it.
We've made ignorance our favourite excuse for not living.
We've made ignorance our favourite excuse for not trying. As long as we don't know, we don't feel compelled to try and achieve. How convenient, if it wasn't so fake! We live by refusing to learn to become better and by not feeling obliged to support the increased demands of this improvement. This way, we become worse until we become so bad that we can’t be anything but miserable. We fear that learning something will make us feel compelled to turn our strengths into victories, thus, risking losing and feeling the pain of a possible defeat due to contact with our weaknesses. On the other hand, by avoiding learning, forgetting something we already know, or not realising all that we do know, we decrease the possibility of doing something that might lead us to a defeat.
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