“Whatever humble art you practice: Are you sure you’re making time for it? Are you loving what you do enough to make the time? Can you trust that if you put in the effort, the rest will take care of itself? Because it will. Love the craft, be the craftsman.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 207)
“Our lives are also fed by kind words and gracious behavior. We are nourished by expressions like ‘excuse me,’ and other such simple courtesies. Our spirits are also richly fed on compliments and praise, nourished by consideration as well as whole wheat bread. Rudeness, the absence of the sacrament of consideration, is but another mark that our time-is-money society is lacking in spirituality, if not also in its enjoyment of life.”
Ed Hays, via Sunbeams (Page 119)
“Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy. For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.”
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, via Sunbeams (Page 119)
“It is a good thing, it is even salutary, for a child to have periods of boredom, for him to learn to know the dialectics of exaggerated play and causeless, pure boredom.”
Gaston Bachelard, via Sunbeams (Page 117)
“For I believe a good king is from the outset and by necessity a philosopher, and the philosopher is from the outset a kingly person.”
Musonius Rufus, via The Daily Stoic (Page 206)
“On those mornings you struggle with getting up, keep this thought in mind—I am awakening to the work of a human being. Why then am I annoyed that I am going to do what I’m made for, the very things for which I was put into this world? Or was I made for this, to snuggle under the covers and keep warm? It’s so pleasurable. Were you then made for pleasure? In short, to be coddled or to exert yourself?”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, via The Daily Stoic (Page 203)
“There are no true beginnings but in pain. When you understand that and can withstand pain, then you’re almost ready to start.”
Leslie Woolf Hedley, via Sunbeams (Page 117)
“Everything in life that’s hard, is just a series of things that are easy. You just have to take that first step.”
Steve Garguilo, TED Talk
“The goodness inside you is like a small flame, and you are its keeper. It’s your job, today and every day, to make sure that it has enough fuel, that it doesn’t get obstructed or snuffed out. Every person has their own version of the flame and is responsible for it, just as you are. If they all fail, the world will be much darker—that is something you don’t control. But so long as your flame flickers, there will be some light in the world.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 201)
“Spiritual humility is not about getting small, not about debasing oneself, but about approaching everything and everyone else with a readiness to see goodness and to be surprised. This is the humility of a child, which Jesus lauded. It is the humility of the scientist and the mystic. It has a lightness of step, not a heaviness of heart.”
Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 266)
“I have seen that wisdom emerges precisely through those moments when we have to hold seemingly opposing realities in a creative tension and interplay: power and frailty, birth and death, pain and hope, beauty and brokenness, mystery and conviction, calm and buoyancy, mine and yours.”
Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 266)
“Our world is abundant with quiet, hidden lives of beauty and courage and goodness. There are millions of people at any given moment, young and old, giving themselves over to service, risking hope, and all the while ennobling us all. To take such goodness in and let it matter—to let it define our take on reality as much as headlines of violence—is a choice we can make to live by the light in the darkness.”
Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 265)
“This really is my life’s work, to go where there is suffering. I suppose, like us all, I’m learning how to deal with the suffering of the world inside myself… to deal with my own pain and most importantly to still have the ability to be proactive.”
Kayla Mueller, via Becoming Wise (Page 263)
“I’ve always felt that one of the things that we do badly in our educational process, especially working with so-called marginalized young people, is that we educate them to figure out how quickly they can get out of the darkness and get into some much more pleasant situation. When what is needed, again and again, are more and more people who will stand in that darkness, who will not run away from those deeply hurt communities, and will open up possibilities that other people can’t see in any other way except through human beings who care about them.”
Vincent Harding, via Becoming Wise (Page 235)
“The person who’s in love with their vision of community will destroy community. But the person who loves the people around them will create community everywhere they go.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, via Becoming Wise (Page 224)
“Spirituality doesn’t look like sitting down and meditating. Spirituality looks like folding the towels in a sweet way and talking kindly to the people in the family even though you’ve had a long day. People often say to me, ‘I have so many things that take up my day. I don’t have time to take up a spiritual practice.’ And the thing is, being a wise parent or a spiritual parent doesn’t take extra time. It’s enfolded into the act of parenting.”
Sylvia Boorstein, via Becoming Wise (Page 223)
“It’s hard to make good news sexy. It is. I think about this a lot as a journalist. But maybe it’s like kindness. Kindness is the stuff of moments, but it can be absolutely transformative in moments. Beautiful lives are transformative in moments. But we have to train ourselves to look for them.”
Sylvia Boorstein, via Becoming Wise (Page 222)
“I’d say, ‘But I’m not happy.’ And [my grandmother] would say, ‘Where is it written that you’re supposed to be happy all the time?’ And I actually think it was the beginning of my spiritual practice—that life is difficult. Then 40 years later, I learned that the buddhists said the same thing, that life is inevitably challenging and how are we going to do it in a way that’s wise and doesn’t complicate it more than it is just by itself?”
Sylvia Boorstein, via Becoming Wise (Page 218)
“While it’s true that someone can impede our actions, they can’t impede our intentions and our attitudes, which have the power of being conditional and adaptable. For the mind adapts and converts any obstacle to its action into a means of achieving it. That which is an impediment to action is turned to advance action. The obstacle on the path becomes the way.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, The Daily Stoic (Page 195)
“‘I was just born this way.’ ‘I never learned anything different.’ ‘My parents set a terrible example.’ ‘Everybody else does it.’ What are these? Excuses that people use to justify staying as they are instead of striving to become better. Of course it’s possible to curb our arrogance, control our anger, and be a caring person. How do you think others do it? Certainly their parents weren’t perfect; they didn’t come out of the womb incapable of ego or immune to temptation. They worked on it.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 195)