“Great song is possible, great richness is possible, but one has to start exploring. And the best way to explore the song of one’s life is to love; that is the very methodology. Just as logic is the methodology of science, love is the methodology of the spirit. Just as logic makes you capable of going deeper and deeper into matter, love makes you capable of going deeper and deeper into consciousness. And the deeper you go, the deeper songs are released. When one has reached the very core of one’s being, the whole of life becomes a celebration, an utter celebration.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 215)
Motivational Quotes
“If life is fair, and it will be, it will serve you immeasurable beauties, joys and pleasures—you will feel at times that you do not have the capacity to take them in. You will. Our hearts they are boundless. If life is fair, and it will be, it will bring you huge, merciless sorrows. Devastations of your boundless heart. I wish for you the grace to persevere and accept them across time, for that is the only way these kinds of things can be taken in. A wise and articulate student once told me that struggle is vital. For all of the mundane days in between joy and sorrow? Persevere.”
Dan Weiss | Read Matt’s Blog on this Quote ➜
“The point of philosophy is to challenge you, to make you uncomfortable. It’s to fix the illnesses of the soul, of the mind. Even though there are passages of Meditations that are soothing and reassuring, a lot of them are jarring, a lot of them are uncomfortable or make you think a lot, and a lot of them you might instinctively disagree with. But that’s the point of philosophy: it’s not supposed to be your instructor, it’s supposed to be a kind of medicine.”
Ryan Holiday
“What’s the point of success if it doesn’t free you up to do the right thing? If your money doesn’t give you the security to tell a jerk or a racist to go to hell, how much is it actually worth? The Stoics said that money, like power, was neither good nor bad—that having it was not itself virtuous—but they also believed it was better to have than not, especially if it facilitated being able to act on your virtues”
Ryan Holiday
“We fell asleep in my childhood bed. We still hadn’t had sex since we got married and as I drifted off, I wondered how I ever could. I couldn’t fathom joy or pleasure or losing myself in a moment ever again. Maybe because it felt wrong, like a betrayal. If I really loved her, I had no right to feel those things again.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 153)
“If we always had something to look forward to, we could trick this disease. Not now, cancer, there’s a wedding! And then a tasting in Napa! Then an anniversary, a birthday. Come back when we’re not so busy.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 145)
“If I imagine what a miserable working week would be (within the context of my existing business), it would be Zoom calls all day, no creative work, strict deadlines from sponsors, and the feeling that I’m making videos that I don’t actually think are useful just for the sake of an algorithm or a sponsor. I’m also staying in the house all day, not doing any exercise, eating unhealthy takeaway food, and not seeing any friends. Okay great, I’ve just defined what my nightmare work week would look like. So now I can just make sure to avoid having work days that look like that.”
Ali Abdaal
“The producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Habit is necessary; but it is the habit of having careless habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive… one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”
Edith Wharton
“I talked about how love was an action, an instinct, a response roused by unplanned moments and small gestures, an inconvenience in someone else’s favor. How I felt it most when he drove up to New York after work at three in the morning just to hold me in a warehouse in Brooklyn after I’d discovered my mother was sick. The many times these months he’d flown three thousand miles whenever I needed him. While he listened patiently through the five calls a day I’d been making since June.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 143)
“I loved that she did not fear god. I loved that she believed in reincarnation, the idea that after all this she could start anew. When I asked her what she’d want to come back as, she always told me she’d like to return as a tree. It was a strange and comforting answer, that rather than something grand and heroic, my mother preferred to return to life as something humble and still.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 135)
“In the same way that a vaccine exposes our body to a manageable amount of the virus or the disease, teaching it how to fight the illness, talking to ourselves (or our children) about what is going to happen in advance of it happening helps us deal with it. It removes the surprise, it removes the suddenness of it. The last thing you want to do is to face anything—a virus or a trip to the grocery store with a tired kid—defenseless. Especially when there are defenses available.”
Ryan Holiday
“I knew it was risky to add even more pressure to already tumultuous circumstances, and yet it felt like the perfect way to shed light on the darkest of situations. Instead of mulling over blood thinners and Fentanyl, we could discuss Chiavari chairs and macarons and dress shoes. Instead of bedsores and catheters, it’d be color schemes and updos and shrimp cocktail. Something to fight for, a celebration to look forward to.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 129)
“This obsession with my mother’s caloric intake killed my own appetite. Since I’d been in Eugene, I’d lost ten pounds. The little flap of belly my mother always pinched at had disappeared and my hair began to fall out in large chunks in the shower from the stress. In a perverse way I was glad for it. My own weight loss made me feel tied to her. I wanted to embody a physical warning—that if she began to disappear, I would disappear, too.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 100)
“Despair comes because energy goes on leaking, and people have forgotten how to contain it. In a thousand and one thoughts, worries, desires, imagination, dreams, memories, energy is leaking. And energy is leaking in unnecessary things that can be easily avoided. When there is no need to talk, people go on talking. When there is no need to do anything, they cannot sit silently; they have to ‘do.’ People are obsessed with doing, as if doing is a sort of intoxicant; it keeps them drunk. they remain occupied so that they don’t have time to think about the real problems of life. They keep themselves busy so that they don’t bump into themselves. They are afraid—afraid of the abyss that is yawning within. This is how energy goes on leaking, and this is why you never have too much of it. One has to learn how to drop the unnecessary. And ninety percent of ordinary life is unnecessary; it can easily be dropped.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 211)
“I wondered if I should try to explain how important it was to me. That cooking my mother’s food had come to represent an absolute role reversal, a role I was meant to fill. That food was an unspoken language between us, that it had come to symbolize our return to each other, our bonding, our common ground. But I was so grateful for Kye’s help that I didn’t want to bother her. I chalked these feelings up to the unwarranted self-involvement of an only child and decided if Kye wouldn’t teach me, I should commit myself to another role.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 98)
“I remembered how when I was a child I would slip my cold feet between my mother’s thighs to warm them. How she’d shiver and whisper that she would always suffer to bring me comfort, that that was how you knew someone really loved you. I remembered the boots she’d broken in so that by the time I got them I could go on unbothered, without harm. Now, more than ever, I wished desperately for a way to transfer pain, wished I could prove to my mother just how much I loved her, that I could just crawl into her hospital cot and press my body close enough to absorb her burden. It seemed only fair that life should present such an opportunity to prove one’s filial piety. That the months my mother had been a vessel for me, her organs shifting and cramping together to make room for my existence, and the agony she’d endured upon my exit could be repaid by carrying this pain in her place. The rite of an only daughter. But I could do no more than lie nearby, ready to be her advocate, listening to the slow and steady beeping of machinery, the soft sounds of her breathing in and out.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 86)
“In marked contrast to the other domains of parental authority, my mother was loose when it came to the rules regarding food. If I didn’t like something, she never forced me to eat it, and if I ate only half my portion, she never made me finish the plate. She believed food should be enjoyed and that it was more of a waste to expand your stomach than to keep eating when you were full. Her only rule was that you had to try everything once.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 22)
“Some of the earliest memories I can recall are of my mother instructing me to always ‘save ten percent of yourself.’ What she meant was that, no matter how much you thought you loved someone, or thought they loved you, you never gave all of yourself. Save 10 percent, always, so there was something to fall back on. ‘Even from Daddy, I save,’ she would add.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 18)
“The idea of ‘Fuck Yes…or N’ is far too simple and has caused me quite a lot of grief. Dropping out of college, I was maybe 51/49 on it. Leaving my corporate job to become a writer, maybe 60/40. Right now I’m about to do something big that I am both excited and terrified about. The point is: The certainty comes later. The truly life-changing decisions are never simple. If I had only ever done things I was absolutely certain about, I’d have missed out on experiences I love. Conversely, I regret a good chunk of my ‘Fuck yes’s’ because I was caught up in a fit of passion or bias. The whole point of risk is that you don’t know.“
Ryan Holiday