“If your mind has developed a certain cast—the habit of panicking, then it won’t matter how good things get for you. You’re still primed for panic. Your mind will still find things to worry about, and you’ll still be miserable. Perhaps more so even, because now you have more to lose.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 289)
“For me, success is not a public thing. It’s a private thing. It’s when you have fewer and fewer regrets.”
Toni Morrison, The Guardian
“Make yourself invulnerable to your dependency on comfort and convenience, or one day your vulnerability might bring you to your knees.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 287)
“Show me someone who isn’t a slave! One is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to power, and all are slaves to fear. I could name a former Consul who is a slave to a little old woman, a millionaire who is the slave of the cleaning woman… No servitude is more abject than the self-imposed.”
Seneca, via The Daily Stoic (Page 287)
“Being unexpected adds to the weight of a disaster, and being a surprise has never failed to increase a person’s pain. For that reason, nothing should ever be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent out in advance to all things and we shouldn’t just consider the normal course of things, but what could actually happen. For is there anything in life that Fortune won’t knock off its high horse if it pleases her?”
Seneca, via The Daily Stoic (Page 286)
“Training in the martial arts or combat is a deeply thoughtful study of movement. We sometimes think of soldiers as automatons, but what they’ve actually built is a steady pattern of unconscious behaviors. Any of us can build these.”
Ryan Holiday, via The Daily Stoic (Page 285)
“Upon the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that, upon other fields, on other days will bear the fruits of victory.”
Douglass MacArthur, via The Daily Stoic (Page 282)
“It is more worthy in the eyes of God… if a writer makes three pages sharp and funny about the lives of geese than to make three hundred fat and flabby about God or the American people.”
Garrison Keillor, via Sunbeams (Page 134)
“If one can actually revert to the truth, then a great deal of one’s suffering can be erased—because a great deal of one’s suffering is based on sheer lies.”
R. D. Laing, via Sunbeams (Page 134)