“Remember: even what we get for free has a cost, if only in what we pay to store it—in our garages and in our minds. As you walk past your possessions today, ask yourself: Do I need this? Is it superfluous? What’s this actually worth? What is it costing me?”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 75)
The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves [Book]
Book Overview: An extraordinary book for anyone eager to understand the hidden motives that shape our lives. In his work as a practicing psychoanalyst, Stephen Grosz has spent the last twenty-five years uncovering the hidden feelings behind our most baffling behavior. The Examined Life distills more than fifty thousand hours of conversation into pure psychological insight without the jargon. This extraordinary book is about one ordinary process: talking, listening, and understanding. Its aphoristic and elegant stories teach us a new kind of attentiveness. They also unveil a delicate self-portrait of the analyst at work and show how lessons learned in the consulting room can reveal as much to the analyst as to the patient. These are stories about our everyday lives; they are about the people we love and the lies we tell, the changes we bear and the grief. Ultimately, they show us not only how we lose ourselves but also how we might find ourselves.
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Great on Kindle. Great Experience. Great Value. The Kindle edition of this book comes highly recommended on Amazon.
Post(s) Inspired by this Book:
“Whatever the next thing is I write, it’s got to be even more naked than the last.”
Harold Pinter, via Sunbeams (Page 50)
“Two things come to mind that are euphoric for me. One is the universal euphoric: sex, that period of time when you are at an absolute peak of sexual feeling. The other is when I create something that moves me. When I am the audience to my own creation and I’m moved. If it were a drug and I could buy it, I’d spend all my money on it.”
Paul Simon, via Sunbeams (Page 50)
“The person is free who lives as they wish, neither compelled, nor hindered, nor limited—whose choices aren’t hampered, whose desires succeed, and who don’t fall into what repels them. Who wishes to live in deception—tripped up, mistaken, undisciplined, complaining, in a rut? No one. These are base people who don’t live as they wish; and so, no base person is free.”
Epictetus, Discourses, via The Daily Stoic (Page 74)
“If you put the jelly on before the peanut butter, the sandwich will fail. And if you try to spread the peanut butter on the plate and then add the bread, it will fail even worse. Like so many things, the order is not optional. And yet, we often do the least-scary or easiest parts first, regardless of what the order of operations tells us.”
Seth Godin, Blog
“We’re all complicated people. We have multiple sides to ourselves—conflicting wants, desires, and fears. The outside world is no less confusing and contradictory. If we’re not careful, all these forces—pushing and pulling—will eventually tear us apart. If we do not focus on our internal integration—on self-awareness—we risk external disintegration.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 73)
“You must begin to trust yourself sometime. I suggest you do it now. If you do not then you will forever be looking to others to prove your own merit to you, and you will never be satisfied. You will always be asking others what to do, and at the same time resenting those from whom you seek such aid. It will seem to you that their experience is legitimate and yours counterfeit. You will feel shortchanged. You will find yourself exaggerating the negative aspects of your life, and the positive sides of other people’s experiences. You are a multidimensional personality. Trust the miracle of your own being. Make no divisions between the physical and the spiritual in your lifetime, for the spiritual speaks with a physical voice and the corporeal body is the creation of the spirit.”
Jane Roberts, The Nature Of Personal Reality, via Sunbeams (Page 48)
“Mind invented contradictions, invented names; it called some things beautiful, some ugly, some good, some bad. One part of life was love, another murder. How young, foolish, comical this mind was. One of its inventions was time. A subtle invention, a refined instrument for torturing the self even more keenly and making the world multiplex and difficult. For then man was separated from all he craved only by time, by time alone, this crazy invention! It was one of the props, one of the crutches that you had to let go, that one above all, if you wanted to be free.”
Hermann Hesse, Klein And Wagner, via Sunbeams (Page 48)
“We underestimate our capabilities just as much and just as dangerously as we overestimate other abilities. Cultivate the ability to judge yourself accurately and honestly. Look inward to discern what you’re capable of and what it will take to unlock that potential.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 72)
“If I speak with the eloquence of men and of angels, but have no love, I become no more than blaring brass or crashing cymbal. If I have the gift of foretelling the future and hold in my hand not only all human knowledge but the very secrets of God, and if I also have that absolute faith which can move mountains, but have no love, I amount to nothing at all. If I dispose of all that i possess, yes even if I give my own body to be burned, but have no love, I achieve precisely nothing. This love of which I speak is slow to lose patience—it looks for a way of being constructive. It is not possessive; it is neither anxious to impress nor does it cherish inflated ideas of its own importance. Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. It is, in fact, the one thing that still stands when all else has fallen.”
St. Paul, 1 Corinthians, via Sunbeams (Page 47)
“Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole ploughshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the wind may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guest, an altar for the unknown God.”
Henri Frédéric Amiel, via Sunbeams (Page 47)
“In the miraculous spontaneity of the sun, there is discipline that utterly escapes you, and a knowledge beyond any that we know. And in the spontaneous playing of the bees from flower to flower, there is a discipline beyond any that you know, and laws that follow their own knowledge and joy that is beyond command. For true discipline, you see, is found only in spontaneity.”
Jane Roberts, Seth Speaks, via Sunbeams (Page 47)
13 Intriguing Quotes from Daily Rituals and How Great Creators—Create
Excerpt: How do great creators make time, find inspiration, and produce incredible bodies of work? Read these quotes from Daily Rituals to find out…
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