“Only when we stop pretending to be something we are not—when we no longer feel the need to hide or overcompensate for either our weaknesses or our gifts—will we know the freedom of expressing our authentic self and have the ability to make choices that are based on the life we truly desire to live.”
Debbie Ford, The Shadow Effect (Page 106)
“Heroes are only as strong as their villains.”
Debbie Ford, The Shadow Effect (Page 103)
“Every one of us has constructed an ego-based identity in which we have assigned ourselves an acceptable role that eventually smothers our full self-expression. Rather than being who we really are, we become a characterization of the person we think we ‘should’ be.”
Debbie Ford, The Shadow Effect (Page 100)
“We possess every human characteristic and emotion, whether active or dormant, whether conscious or unconscious. There is nothing we can conceive of that we are not. We are everything—that which we consider good and that which we consider bad. How could we know courage if we have never known fear? How could we know happiness if we never experienced sadness? How could we know light if we never knew dark?”
Debbie Ford, The Shadow Effect (Page 95)
“One has not understood until one has forgotten it.”
Suzuki Daisetz, via Sunbeams (Page 109)
“It had done me good to be somewhat parched by the heat and drenched by the rain of life.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, via Sunbeams (Page 109)
“Anything that is given can be at once taken away. We have to learn never to expect anything, and when it comes it’s no more than a gift on loan.”
John McGahern, The Leavetaking, via Sunbeams (Page 109)
“One does not magically get one’s act together—it is a matter of many individual choices. It’s a matter of getting up at the right time, making your bed, resisting shortcuts, investing in yourself, doing your work. And make no mistake: while the individual action is small, its cumulative impact is not.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 161)
“The thing you earned, that you depend on, that was hard to do—it’s a gift from your former self. Just because you have a law degree, a travel agency or the ability to do calligraphy in Cyrillic doesn’t mean that your future self is obligated to accept that gift. We hold on to the old competencies and our hard-earned status roles far longer than we should. The only way to be creative is to do something new, and the path to something new requires leaving something else behind. New decisions based on new information are at the heart of leadership. But you can’t make those decisions if you’re also busy calculating how much the old decisions cost you.”
Seth Godin, Blog
“Only in the presence of an unwavering commitment to facing our demons does the doorway to self-discovery open.”
Debbie Ford, The Shadow Effect (Page 93)
“When we expose our dark side, we understand how our personal history dictates the way we treat those around us—and how we treat ourselves. This is why it’s imperative that we unmask it and understand it. To do this, we must uncover what we’ve hidden and befriend the very impulses and characteristics that we abhor.”
Debbie Ford, The Shadow Effect (Page 93)
“It’s ironic that to find the courage to lead an authentic life, you will have to go into the dark rooms of your most inauthentic self. You have to confront the very parts of yourself that you fear most to find what you have been looking for, because the mechanism that drives you to conceal your darkness is the same mechanism that has you hide your light. What you’ve been hiding from can actually give you what you’ve been trying hard to achieve.”
Debbie Ford, The Shadow Effect (Page 92)
“Poet and author Robert Bly describes the shadow as an invisible bag that each of us carries around on our back. As we’re growing up, we put in the bag every aspect of ourselves that is not acceptable to our families and friends. Bly believes we spend the first few decades of our life filling up our bag, and then the rest of our life trying to retrieve everything we’ve hidden away.”
Debbie Ford, The Shadow Effect (Page 86)
“As far as the writing itself is concerned it takes next to no time at all. Much too much is written every day of our lives. We are overwhelmed by it. But when at times we see through the welter of evasive or interested patter, when by chance we penetrate to some moving detail of a life, there is always time to bang out a few pages. The thing isn’t to find the time for it—we waste hours every day doing absolutely nothing at all—the difficulty is to catch the evasive life of the thing, to phrase the words in such a way that stereotype will yield a moment of insight. This is where the difficulty lies. We are lucky when that underground current can be tapped and the secret spring of all our lives will send up its pure water. It seldom happens. A thousand trivialities push themselves to the front, our lying habits of everyday speech and thought are foremost, telling us that that is what ‘they’ want to hear. Tell them something else.”
William Carlos Williams, via Sunbeams (Page 107)
“What keeps our faith cheerful is the extreme persistence of gentleness and humor. Gentleness is everywhere in daily life, a sign that faith rules through ordinary things: through cooking and small talk, through storytelling, making love, fishing, tending animals and sweet corn and flowers, through sports, music, and books, raising kids—all the places where the gravy soaks in and grace shines through. Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people. Lacking any other purpose in life, it would be good enough to live for their sake.”
Garrison Keillor, via Sunbeams (Page 107)
“Today, you can hope that good fortune and good luck magically come your way. Or you can prepare yourself to get lucky by focusing on doing the right thing at the right time—and, ironically, render luck mostly unnecessary in the process.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 158)
“But what is philosophy? Doesn’t it simply mean preparing ourselves for what may come? Don’t you understand that really amounts to saying that if I would so prepare myself to endure, then let anything happen that will? Otherwise, it would be like the boxer exiting the ring because he took some punches. Actually, you can leave the boxing ring without consequence, but what advantage would come from abandoning the pursuit of wisdom? So, what should each of us say to every trial we face? This is what I’ve trained for, for this my discipline!”
Epictetus, Discourses, via The Daily Stoic (Page 155)
“The best thing for being sad… is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”
T.H. White, The Once and Future King
“Saying no saves you time in the future. Saying yes costs you time in the future. No is like a time credit. You can spend that block of time in the future. Yes is like a time debt. You have to repay that commitment at some point. No is a decision. Yes is a responsibility.”
James Clear, Blog