“She carried about her that best of grandmotherly atmospheres—a sense of amplitude in Time. No hurry ever came near her. A whole series of episodes in my childhood show her peacefully reading, or dressing, or brushing the long white hair that could still touch her knees, while a babel of agitated voices urged departing carriages or trains. She always had a book in her hand and never seemed busy; she would put it down and her arms would open to enclose any human being, but particularly a child, who needed refuge there; what she gave was affection pure and simple, deliberately free from wear and tear of understanding or advice.”
Freya Stark, Traveller’s Prelude (via Time And The Art Of Living: Page 186)
“In writing your journal give primary attention to detail; for it is detail which organizes and preserves experience for your future self or some other reader. General statements like ‘We had a wonderful time’ or ‘It was a dismal morning’ make a mockery of the whole procedure, for they evaluate experience without recreating it. I kept long journals from ages ten to twenty-two, chronicling events and describing emotional states, but again and again missing the physical immediacy of experience, the tiny hooks by which experience could have been caught and held. I failed to record how we looked, what we saw, the minor eccentricities of circumstance which gave special character to a day. I ignored these elements not only through lack of training but through misplaced priorities: I mistakingly assumed that one could discuss the heart of things without discussing the surface of things.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 180)
“Regretting wasted time is itself a waste of time, an unconscious strategy of evasion.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 164)
“We struggle with, agonize over and bluster heroically about the great questions of life when the answers to most of these lie hidden in our attitude toward the thousand minor details of each day.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 164)
“I don’t gamble. I don’t spend recklessly. But I do have an expensive habit: anxiety. It’s cost me hours of sleep, moments with my family, and opportunities I let pass because I was too caught up in my fears. It’s the vacation I didn’t enjoy, the dinner I spoiled, the car ride I spent stressing instead of being present. Seneca said, ‘We suffer more in imagination than in reality.’ Anxiety drags us into a future that doesn’t exist, forcing us to live out worst-case scenarios that rarely happen. And yet, the time and energy anxiety steals are gone forever. The good news? If anxiety comes from within us, we can choose to let it go. Marcus Aurelius put it simply: ‘Today I escaped from anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me.'”
Ryan Holiday
“At his house, George [Raveling] has these big red binders filled with notes. He calls them his ‘learning journals.’ They’re his version of a commonplace book—a collection of ideas, quotes, observations, and information gathered over time. The purpose is to record and organize these gems for later use in your life and work. It’s a habit he’s kept since 1972. To this day, he told me, ‘I go back and just read through them. I’ll just get one of the binders and I’ll sit down at the kitchen table and start reading through it. Sometimes I come across stuff that is more applicable today than it was when I wrote it in there.'”
Ryan Holiday
“Let us ask the gods not for possessions, but for things to do; happiness is in making things rather than in consuming them. In Utopia, said Thoreau, each would build his own home; and then song would come back to the heart of man, as it comes to the bird when it builds its nest. If we cannot build our homes, we can at least walk and throw and run; and we should never be so old as merely to watch games instead of playing them. Let us play is as good as Let us pray, and the results are more assured.”
Will Durant, Fallen Leaves
“Brainstorm some answers to these questions:
- Which activity makes you the most money per minute?
- Which activity delivers the most excitement per minute?
- Which activity creates the most connection per minute?
- Which activity provides you the most laughter per minute?
And which activity is the best blend?”
James Clear
“Because work has temporal structure, we unconsciously associate leisure with temporal disorganization. And over this deadening rhythm is played, again and again, the same psychological bolero: Monday, the Day of Wrath; Tuesday and Wednesday, the grind; weary Thursday, across whose fallowness Friday, a prostitute-goddess of inexplicably renewable freshness, beckons with a promise of unspecified fulfillment. This promise is based on the lie that human nature, unfulfilled by work, can be fulfilled by leisure. Of course the promise is never kept; we spend Saturday and Sunday consecrating the week’s successes and failures to oblivion, in deepening dread of the Monday to come.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 156)
“The years forget our errors and forgive our sins, but they punish our inaction with living death.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 128)
“Thus at the beginnings of things it is well to treat ourselves to a luxury of blankness, to go into each day’s work without the deadening burdens of continuity, consistency and fixed purpose. Don’t look back; you will have time enough for that during later stages. At this point the essential things are amplitude, variety, boldness, imagination. Contradictions are not only allowable but essential; for without them you will almost always fail to transcend your initial understanding.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 122)
“Achievements like the writing of books, the painting of pictures, and indeed all long and cumulative indivisual efforts, are greater than the individuals who produce them, if we view these individuals at any single point in time. For no one can in a single moment recall the multitude of shapes his mind took during the course of the work, or revive the various intensisties of passion and calm which injected themselves into its production, or glow with the incremental power built up by weeks or months of care. The work resembels not the partial man, alone within the minutes, but the whole man, incorporate in time.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 122)
“Borrowed wisdom breaks under pressure because you haven’t earned it. You’re trusting someone else’s compression without knowing what created it. Earned wisdom, on the other hand, holds up because it’s rooted in your actual experience. You know when it works, why it works, when to ignore it and when to bend it because you created the compression.”
Shane Parrish
“I realized that I have been living for the emotional scraps of approval—not from strangers, but from my husband. He loves slow, lazy Sundays; I love Sundays that feed me—meditation, a run, reading, a workshop. To keep the peace, I’ve been bending toward his rhythm: cramming ‘me’ into Saturday and then drifting through Sunday beside him. The cost has been a low-grade guilt and the quiet ache of self-abandonment; I end too many weekends disappointed in myself.
So I’m recalibrating. I’m not asking him to change; I’m choosing to keep one promise to myself before I keep any to anyone else. ‘Me-First Sundays’ start now: 7–11 AM are mine—long meditation, a run, a chapter, and one learning block—then shared downtime together. I want my weekends to end with pride, not apology. I choose aliveness over approval.”
Shruti, via The Secret To Resilience