“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
“Big, blown-out fantasies about our lives stem from the pain of our unrealized potential, but true dreams are a reality we are willing to work for, fight for, stay up late for—this is a future that is within our reach.”
Debbie Ford, The Shadow Effect (Page 85)
“Sometimes, we forget that we ever wanted anything different from what we have. The repetitiveness of our toxic memory can lure us into years of accepting more of the same and wasting away in a mediocre existence that fails to meet even our own expectations.”
Debbie Ford, The Shadow Effect (Page 84)
“The level of the problem is never the level of the solution.”
Deepak Chopra, The Shadow Effect (Page 64)
“We all have a mental image of what a desirable physical body is like—trim, healthy, youthful, fresh, pleasing to look at. But we don’t use those qualities with regard to our emotions, our ’emotional body.’ The emotional body, like the physical body, must be properly nourished. It can grow tired and flabby when the same responses to the world are repeated over and over. It becomes diseased when exposed to toxins and unhealthy influences.”
Deepak Chopra, The Shadow Effect (Page 49)
“You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time.”
M. Scott Peck, via Sunbeams (Page 106)
“The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.”
Theodore Rubin, via Sunbeams (Page 106)
“You get the emotions you think you deserve.”
Deepak Chopra, The Shadow Effect (Page 46)
“It sounds strange, but feelings have feelings. Being part of you, they know when they are unwanted. Fear cooperates by hiding; anger cooperates by pretending it doesn’t exist. That’s more than half the problem. How can you heal an unwanted feeling when it’s trying not to cooperate? You can’t. Until you make peace with negative feelings, they will persist. The way to deal with negativity is to acknowledge it. Nothing more is needed.”
Deepak Chopra, The Shadow Effect (Page 42)
“You are not in the world. The world is in you.”
Deepak Chopra, The Shadow Effect (Page 40)
“Inside you is the cause of every war. It is your violence, hidden and denied, that leads to wars of every kind, whether it is war inside your home, against others in society, or between nations.”
J. Krishnamurti, via The Shadow Effect (Page 40)
“It takes a long time to become young.”
Pablo Picasso, via Sunbeams (Page 105)
“One of the hallmarks of the martial arts, military training, and athletic training of almost any kind is the hours upon hours upon hours of monotonous practice. An athlete at the highest level will train for years to perform movements that can last mere seconds—or less. The two-minute drill, how to escape from a chokehold, the perfect jumper. Simply knowing isn’t enough. It must be absorbed into the muscles and the body. It must become part of us. Or we risk losing it the second that we experience stress or difficulty.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 153)
“The first step in defeating the shadow is to abandon all notions of defeating it. The dark side of human nature thrives on war, struggle, and conflict. As soon as you talk about ‘winning,’ you have lost already.”
Deepak Chopra, The Shadow Effect (Page 14)
“Higher consciousness is the answer—the only lasting answer—to the dark side of human nature.”
Deepak Chopra, The Shadow Effect (Page 13)
“I love her and she loves me and together we hate each other with a wild hatred born of love.”
Edvard Munch, via Sunbeams (Page 103)