“Whatever happens today, let it find us prepared and active: ready for problems, ready for difficulties, ready for people to behave in disappointing or confusing ways, ready to accept and make it work for us. Let’s not wish we could turn back time or remake the universe according to our preference. Not when it would be far better and far easier to remake ourselves.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 184)
“I take it as an elemental truth of life that words matter. This is so plain that we can ignore it a thousand times a day. The words we use shape how we understand ourselves, how we interpret the world, how we treat others. From Genesis to the aboriginal songlines of Australia, human beings have forever perceived that naming brings the essence of things into being. The ancient rabbis understood books, texts, the very letters of certain words as living, breathing entities. Words make worlds.”
Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 15)
“Much of politics and media sends us in the opposite, infantilizing direction. We reduce great questions of meaning and morality to ‘issues’ and simplify them to two sides, allowing pundits and partisans to frame them in irreconcilable extremes. But most of us don’t see the world this way, and it’s not the way the world actually works.”
Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 12)
“People who have turned the world on its axis across history have called humanity to love. It’s time to dare this more bravely in our midst, and dare learning together how love can be practical, creative, and sustained as a social good, not merely a private good.”
Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 10)
“What we practice, we become. What’s true of playing the piano or throwing a ball also holds for our capacity to move through the world mindlessly and destructively or generously and gracefully. I’ve come to think of virtues and rituals as spiritual technologies for being our best selves in flesh and blood, time and space.”
Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 9)
“The ‘news’ is defined as the extraordinary events of the day, but it is most often translated as the extraordinarily terrible events of the day. And in an immersive 24/7 news cycle, we internalize the deluge of bad news as the norm—the real truth of who we are and what we’re up against as a species.”
Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 4)
“History always repeats itself until we honestly and searchingly know ourselves.”
Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 3)
“The question of what it means to be human is now inextricable from the question of who we are to each other.”
Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 2)
“The wise act with a reverse clause—meaning that they not only consider what might go wrong, but they are prepared for that to be exactly what they want to happen—it is an opportunity for excellence and virtue.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 181)
“Every event has two handles—one by which it can be carried, and one by which it can’t. If your brother does you wrong, don’t grab it by his wronging, because this is the handle incapable of lifting it. Instead, use the other—that he is your brother, that you were raised together, and then you will have hold of the handle that carries.”
Epictetus, Enchiridion, via The Daily Stoic (Page 180)
“Stoics do not seek to have the answer for every question or a plan for every contingency. Yet they’re also not worried. Why? Because they have confidence that they’ll be able to adapt and change with the circumstances. Instead of looking for instruction, they cultivate skills like creativity, independence, self-confidence, ingenuity, and the ability to problem solve. In this way, they are resilient instead of rigid. We can practice the same.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 178)
“The first rule of holes, goes the adage, is that ‘if you find yourself in a hold, stop digging.’ This might be the most violated piece of commonsense wisdom in the world. Because what most of us do when something happens, goes wrong, or is inflicted on us is make it worse—first, by getting angry or feeling aggrieved, and next, by flailing around before we have much in the way of a plan. Today, give yourself the most simple and doable of tasks: just don’t make stuff worse.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 177)
“Find a place inside where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.”
Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey
“We’re in a freefall into future. We don’t know where we’re going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you’re going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It’s a very interesting shift of perspective and that’s all it is… joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.”
Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey
“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.”
Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey
“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”
Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey
“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey
“When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous.”
Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey
“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”
Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey