“If I speak with the eloquence of men and of angels, but have no love, I become no more than blaring brass or crashing cymbal. If I have the gift of foretelling the future and hold in my hand not only all human knowledge but the very secrets of God, and if I also have that absolute faith which can move mountains, but have no love, I amount to nothing at all. If I dispose of all that i possess, yes even if I give my own body to be burned, but have no love, I achieve precisely nothing. This love of which I speak is slow to lose patience—it looks for a way of being constructive. It is not possessive; it is neither anxious to impress nor does it cherish inflated ideas of its own importance. Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. It is, in fact, the one thing that still stands when all else has fallen.”
St. Paul, 1 Corinthians, via Sunbeams (Page 47)
“Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole ploughshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the wind may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guest, an altar for the unknown God.”
Henri Frédéric Amiel, via Sunbeams (Page 47)
“In the miraculous spontaneity of the sun, there is discipline that utterly escapes you, and a knowledge beyond any that we know. And in the spontaneous playing of the bees from flower to flower, there is a discipline beyond any that you know, and laws that follow their own knowledge and joy that is beyond command. For true discipline, you see, is found only in spontaneity.”
Jane Roberts, Seth Speaks, via Sunbeams (Page 47)
“When children stick their hand down a narrow goody jar they cant get their full fist out and start crying. Drop a few treats and you will get it out! Curb your desire—don’t set your heart on so many things and you will get what you need.”
Epictetus, Discourses, via The Daily Stoic (Page 69)
“There’s no one way—there’s too much drivel about this subject. You’re who you are, not Fitzgerald or Thomas Wolfe. You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter. If he or she is not disciplined, no sympathetic magic will help. The trick is to make time—not steal it—and produce the fiction. If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.”
Bernard Malamud, via Daily Rituals (Page 233)
“Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream. Your schedule—in at about the same time every day, out when your thousand words are on paper or disk—exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go. In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives. And as your mind and body grow accustomed to a certain amount of sleep each night—six hours, seven, maybe even the recommended eight—so can you train your waking mind to sleep creatively and work out the vividly imagined waking dreams which are successful works of fiction.”
Stephen King, via Daily Rituals (Page 224)
“I don’t hold myself to longer hours; if I did, I wouldn’t gain by it. The only reason I write is because it interests me more than any other activity I’ve ever found. I like riding, going to operas and concerts, travel in the west; but on the whole writing interests me more than anything else. If I made a chore of it, my enthusiasm would die. I make it an adventure every day. I get more entertainment from it than any I could buy, except the privilege of hearing a few great musicians and singers. To listen to them interests me as much as a good morning’s work.”
Willa Cather, via Daily Rituals (Page 199) | Read Matt’s Blog on this quote ➜
“As you grow older you will find that your desires are never really fulfilled. In fulfillment there is always the shadow of frustration, and in your heart there is not a song but a cry. The desire to become—to become a great man, a great saint, a great this or that—has no end and therefore no fulfillment; its demand is ever for the ‘more,’ and such desire always breeds agony, misery, wars. But when one is free of all desire to become, there is a state of being whose action is totally different. It is. That which is has no time. It does not think in terms of fulfillment. Its very being is in its fulfillment.”
J. Krishnamurti, Think On These Things, via Sunbeams (Page 46)
George St-Pierre | Read Matt’s Blog on this quote ➜
When you pay attention to detail, the big picture will take care of itself.
“I’ve never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.”
John Updike, via Daily Rituals (Page 195) | Read Matt’s Blog on this quote ➜
“A solid routine saves you from giving up.”
John Updike, via Daily Rituals (Page 195)
“Some pianists say they are the slaves of their instrument. If I am its slave, all I can say is—I have a very kind master.”
Sergey Rachmaninoff, Daily Rituals (Page 179)
“Whoever wants to see a brick must look at its pores, and must keep his eyes close to it. But whoever wants to see a cathedral cannot see it as he sees a brick. This demands a respect for distance.”
José Ortega y Gasset, via Sunbeams (Page 45)
“If someone sends you an angry email but you never see it, did it actually happen? In other words, these situations require our participation, context, and categorization in order to be ‘bad.’ Our reaction is what actually decides whether harm has occurred. If we feel that we’ve been wronged and get angry, of course that’s how it will seem. If we raise our voice because we feel we’re being confronted, naturally a confrontation will ensue. But if we retain control of ourselves, we decide whether to label something good or bad.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 64)
“Smart isn’t easily measurable. Neither is beautiful, good or successful. And especially happy. A high SAT score is a measure of whether or not you scored well on the SAT. That’s it. A bank balance is a measure of how much money you have in the bank. That’s all. In the face of the difficulty the system has in measuring things that don’t measure, we create proxies. Things like popularity as a proxy for whether a work of human creativity has worth or not. It’s a method built to process commodities instead of people, and it’s running amok.”
Seth Godin, Blog
“I keep to [my] routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”
Haruki Murakami, via Daily Rituals (Page 60) | Read Matt’s Blog on this quote ➜
“You can’t steer a stationary ship.”
Nicolas Cole | Read Matt’s Blog on this quote ➜
“[René] Descartes believed that idleness was essential to good mental work, and he made sure not to overexert himself.
Mason Currey, Daily Rituals (Page 151)
“My life has been my music, it’s always come first, but the music ain’t worth nothing if you can’t lay it on the public.”
Louis Armstrong, via Daily Rituals (Page 114) (Read Matt’s Blog On This Quote)
“Circumstances are incapable of considering or caring for your feelings, your anxiety, or your excitement. They don’t care about your reaction. They are not people. So stop acting like getting worked up is having an impact on a given situation. Situations don’t care at all.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 63)