“The long, slow grind of working toward something is all about loving the process. If you don’t love the process, the grind is tough. The grind is also a dangerous time. It’s when you’re tempted to give up, call it a day, or at least cut corners.”
Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit (Page 195)
“Understanding what bothers you is just as important as understanding what excites you.”
Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit (Page 192)
“Find what troubles you about the world, then fix it for the rest of us.”
Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit (Page 179)
“It’s not the length but the quality of life that matters to me. It has always been important to me to write one sentence at a time, to live every day as if it were my last and judge it in those terms, often badly, not because it lacked grand gesture or grand passion but because it failed in the daily virtues of self-discipline, kindness, and laughter. It is love, very ordinary, human love, and not fear, which is the good teacher and the wisest judge.”
Jane Rule, via Sunbeams (Page 67)
“A man must die; that is, he must free himself from a thousand petty attachments and identifications… He is attached to everything in his life, attached to his imagination, attached to his stupidity, attached even to his sufferings, possibly to his sufferings more than to anything else… Attachments to things, identifications with things, keep alive a thousand useless ‘I’s in a man. These ‘I’s must die in order that the big I may be born. But how can they be made to die? They do not want to die. It is at this point that the possibility of awakening comes to the rescue. To awaken means to realize one’s nothingness.”
G. I. Gurdjieff, via Sunbeams (Page 67)
“There are two ways to be wealthy—to get everything you want or to want everything you have. Which is easier right here and right now? The same goes for freedom. If you chafe and fight and struggle for more, you will never be free. If you could find and focus on the pockets of freedom you already have? Well, then you’d be free right here, right now.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 95)
“Even with the support of others, it’s hard to struggle through hardship without sufficient motivation of your own.”
Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit (Page 175)
“Must a dream have only one owner? Not if two or more minds see the world from the same perspective.”
Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit (Page 175)
“If your family or close friends don’t understand your dream, you need to find people who do.”
Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit (Page 175)
“Idealistic reformers are dangerous because their idealism has no roots in love, but is simply a hysterical and unbalanced rage for order amidst their own chaos.”
William Irwin Thompson, via Sunbeams (Page 67)
“I fear nothing, I hope for nothing, I am free.”
Nikos Kazantzakis, via Sunbeams (Page 67)
“Effort can be its own reward if you let it.”
Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit (Page 164) (Read Matt’s Blog On This Quote)
“I read an article a few years ago that said when you practice a sport a lot, you literally become a broadband: the nerve pathway in your brain contains a lot more information. As soon as you stop practicing, the pathway begins shrinking back down. Reading that changed my life. I used to wonder, Why am I doing these sets, getting on a stage? Don’t I know how to do this already? The answer is no. You must keep doing it. The broadband starts to narrow the moment you stop.”
Jerrry Seinfeld, via The Happiness of Pursuit (Page 162)
“We can’t opt out of monotony, but we can choose which form it takes.”
Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit (Page 150) (Read Matt’s Blog On This Quote)
“In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see. In the face of injustice, one may not look the other way. When someone suffers, and it is not you, he comes first. His very suffering gives him priority… To watch over a man who grieves is a more urgent duty than to think of God.”
Elie Wiesel, via Sunbeams (Page 66)
“Do you change people first or do you change society? I believe this is a false dichotomy. You have to change both simultaneously. If you’re changing only yourself and have no concern for changing the society, something goes awry. If you’re changing only society but not changing yourself, something goes awry, as tended to happen in the late 1960s. Now, ‘simultaneously’ may be an overstatement, because I think there are periods when one has to concentrate on one or the other. And there are periods in a society, in a culture, when the emphasis is appropriate only on one or the other. What I’m trying to say is, never lose sight of either the internal world or the external world, the peace within and the peace based on justice on the outside.”
David Dellinger, via Sunbeams (Page 66)
“The diseases of the rational soul are long-standing and hardened vices, such as greed and ambition—they have put the soul in a straitjacket and have begun to be permanent evils inside it. To put it briefly, this sickness is an unrelenting distortion of judgment, so things that are only mildly desirable are vigorously sought after.”
Seneca, Moral Letters, via The Daily Stoic (Page 93)
“We’re all doing time. As soon as we get born, we find ourselves assigned to one little body, one set of desires and fears, one family, city, state, country, and planet. Who can ever understand exactly why or how it comes down as it does? The bottom line is, here we are. Whatever, wherever, whenever we are, this is what we’ve got. It’s up to us whether we do it as easy time or hard time.”
Bo Lozoff, via Sunbeams (Page 65)
“Man’s mind is a mirror of a universe that mirrors man’s mind.”
Joseph Chilton Pearce, via Sunbeams (Page 65)
“At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one’s lost self.”
Brendan Francis, via Sunbeams (Page 65)