“Whenever I go and do something with my kids (like a trip or an activity or an errand) I try to tell myself: Success is wanting to do this again. That is to say, it’s not about accomplishing anything or checking off certain boxes—did we see all the sights, did we get what we needed to get, did we arrive on time or whatever—it’s ultimately whether we got along well enough, enjoyed the experience enough, that at some point in the future they’ll say: ‘Hey, remember when we went to that concert? Can we do that again?’ or ‘Oh, you’re driving across town to grab that thing? Can I come?'”
Ryan Holiday
“We generally save [expression of love] for special occasions, forgetting that love, which is the most precious form of human sustenance, is needed daily. We tend to grow amorous when we need love rather than when we sense that others need it. We are upset and annoyed by another person’s request for our love, feeling that it insults our emotional integrity; when in fact it is usually a healthy invasion of the coldness and distance which guard our egocentric lives. Victims of a romantic illusion which is itself a form of selfish crudeness, we ignore the fact that love can and should be offered by the mind and will as well as by the inspired emotions. By omitting the regular expression of love, we alienate ourselves from the common channels of understanding and sympathy with our fellows, and thus indeed with the sources of inspired emotion as well. We would do well to remember that small children, who express love and appeal for it many times each day, are in this not different from our own inner selves.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 89)
“We generally have a volcanic attitude toward our own intrafamily annoyances and frustrations, not expressing them openly until they have grown so strong that it is impossible either to put them sensibly or hold them back. The eruption usually either provokes or occurs during a family squabble, when all parties involved have lost their tempers or are scared stiff. At these times no one listens carefully, and criticisms are exaggerated; we tend to characterize the actions which upset us, not as temporary and reparable failings, but as the products or ingrained vice or genetic debility. Thus expressed, our anger not only fails to correct disorder but rather becomes an injury which prolongs it. To say that we lack self-control is not enough. What we lack is the courage and providence to have expressed ourselves sooner.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 88)
“People who make moral compromises in order to achieve good ends find that their compromises irrevocably alter the ends achieved. Thus they learn that, in a world of process, it is method rather than goal which carries the burden of moral value; that in the final analysis nothing should be mistaken either for a means or for an end.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 80)
“Written history is composed of actions; real history is actions compounded invisibly with refusals to act.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 68)
“Every home should have a room, or at least a nook with two chairs, where it is a sin punishable by immediate expulsion to speak of money, business, politics or the state of one’s teeth.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 59)
