“It’s a kind of test, Mary, and it’s the only kind that amounts to anything. When something rotten like this happens, then you have your choice. You start to really be alive, or you start to die. That’s all.”
James Agee, A Death In The Family, via Sunbeams (Page 150)
“There is only one thing pain is good for. It teaches you to love. God bless pain.”
Joey Goldfarb, via Sunbeams (Page 150)
“My soul can find no staircase to heaven unless it be through earth’s loveliness.”
Michelangelo, via Sunbeams (Page 150)
“It strikes me that the redwoods have accomplished, without effort or ego, what I have struggled so hard to do. They make existence, as I conceive of it—time measured in hundred-day increments—seem laughably naïve and nearsighted. I feel so tiny and rootless in their midst. Right now, I am no redwood. I am a speck, a spore surfing the breeze, directionless and susceptible, blown any which way, without the faintest clue about where I’ll land.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 304)
“No person hands out their money to passersby, but to how many do each of us hand out our lives! We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers.”
Seneca, The Daily Stoic (Page 365)
“[Rich] has a theory: When we travel, we actually take three trips. There’s the first trip of preparation and anticipation, packing and daydreaming. There’s the trip you’re actually on. And then, there’s the trip you remember. ‘The key is to try to keep all three as separate as possible,’ he says. ‘The key is to be present wherever you are right now.'”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 303)
“Stability for me has always been in someone’s arms, no matter how fleeting the time there. Whenever I am feeling lost or stuck, it’s been my pattern to end whatever relationship I am in and immediately find my compass in a new man. This has always been a convenient way to avoid figuring out what I want for myself or working on the problems at hand. It’s easier to fixate on a new love interest than to face what’s really at stake.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 298)
“We have an irrational fear of acknowledging our own mortality. We avoid thinking about it because we think it will be depressing. In fact, reflecting on mortality often has the opposite effect—invigorating us more than saddening us. Why? Because it gives us clarity.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 361)
“I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung.”
Rabindranath Tagore, via Sunbeams (Page 148)
“People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, via Sunbeams (Page 148)
“The mind cannot long act the role of the heart”
François La Rochefoucauld, via Sunbeams (Page 148)
“If you wait for tomorrow, tomorrow comes. If you don’t wait for tomorrow, tomorrow comes.”
Senegalese Proverb, via Sunbeams (Page 148)
“We may claw and fight and work to own things, but those things can be taken away in a second. The same goes for other things we like to think are ‘ours’ but are equally precarious: our status, our physical health or strength, our relationships. How can these really be ours if something other than us—fate, bad luck, death, and so on—can dispossess us of them without notice? So what do we own? Just our lives—and not for long.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 360)
“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day… The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.”
Seneca, Moral Letters, via The Daily Stoic (Page 349)
“Having a billion dollars is great, but having a billion seconds is priceless. There is no amount of money in the world that can purchase immortality. Every human eventually runs out of time.”
Anthony Pompliano, Blog
“Perhaps the greatest test of love is the way we act in times of need. It is the moment of accountability that all relationships seem to arc toward.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 281)
“At times, my heart feels so haunted that there’s no room for the living—for the possibility of new love, new loss.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 289)
“I’m realizing that if I am to cross the distance between near-death and renewal, instead of trying to bury my pain, I must use it as a guide to know myself better. In confronting my past, I have to reckon not only with the pain of losing other people but also with the pain I’ve caused others. I must keep seeking truths and teachers on these long, lonely stretches of highway even when—especially when—the search brings discomfort.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 283)
“Turn your mind away from the things that provoke it. If you find that discussing politics at the dinner table leads to fighting, why do you keep bringing it up? If your sibling’s life choices bother you, why don’t you stop picking at them and making them your concern? The same goes for so many other sources of aggravation. It’s not a sign of weakness to shut them out. Instead, it’s a sign of strong will.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 349)
“Untamed fear consumes you, becomes you, until what you are most afraid of turns alive.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 281)