“What we desire makes us vulnerable. Whether it’s an opportunity to travel the world or to be the president or for five minutes of peace and quiet, when we pine for something, when we hope against hope, we set ourselves up for disappointment. Because fate can always intervene and then we’ll likely lose our self-control in response.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 61)
“Human beings exist as individuals and as members of groups at all times. I am one and I am one of many… always. This also creates some inherent conflicts of interest. When we make decisions, we must weigh the benefits to us personally against the benefits to our tribe or collective. Quite often, what’s good for one is not necessarily good for the other. Working exclusively to advance ourselves may hurt the group, while working exclusively to advance the group may come at a cost to us as individuals.”
Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last
“Have you ever sat very quietly without any movement? You try it, sit really still, with your back straight, and observe what your mind is doing. Don’t try to control it, don’t say it should not jump from one thought to another, but just be aware of how your mind is jumping. Don’t do anything about it, but watch it as from the banks of a river you watch the river flow by. In the flowing river there are so many things—fishes, leaves, dead animals—but it is always living, moving, and your mind is like that. It is everlastingly restless, flitting from one thing to another like a butterfly… just watch your mind. It is great fun. If you try it as fun, as an amusing thing, you will find that the mind begins to settle down without any effort on your part to control it. There is then no censor, no judge, no evaluator; and when the mind is thus very quiet of itself, spontaneously still, you will discover what it is to be gay. Do you know what gaiety is? It is just to laugh, to take delight in anything or nothing, to know the joy of living, smiling, looking straight into the face of another without any sense of fear.”
J. Krishnamurti, Think On These Things, via Sunbeams (Page 41)
“Good for the body is the work of the body, and good for the soul is the work of the soul, and good for either is the work of the other.”
Henry David Thoreau, Sunbeams (Page 41)
“Ever wonder what God thinks of money? Just look at the people he gives it to.”
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, via The Daily Stoic (Page 60)
“None of us can adequately control the meteorology of other people: they’re nice, they’re nasty, they come, they go. We have no choice but to address, alter and amend the inner coordinate if we want to have a different model of reality, if we want to have more choices.”
Russell Brand, Recovery (Page 122) | Read Matt’s Blog on this quote ➜
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
Seneca | Read Matt’s Blog on this quote ➜
“Every moment and every event of every man’s life plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that comes to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them. For such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere, except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity, and love.”
Thomas Merton, Sunbeams (Page 40)
“Remember to conduct yourself in life as if at a banquet. As something being passed around comes to you, reach out your hand and take a moderate helping. Does it pass you by? Don’t stop it. It hasn’t yet come? Don’t burn in desire for it, but wait until it arrives in front of you. Act this way with children, a spouse, toward position, with wealth—one day it will make you worthy of a banquet with the gods.”
Epictetus, Enchiridion, via The Daily Stoic (Page 59)
“Whenever anything negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it at the time. Even a brief illness or an accident can show you what is real and unreal in your life, what ultimately matters and what doesn’t.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 178) | Read Matt’s Blog on this quote ➜
“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is the awe and circumspection proper to them that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”
C. S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes A Toast, And Other Pieces, Sunbeams (Page 39)
“Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go; first of all in your own home. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next-door neighbor.”
Mother Teresa, Sunbeams (Page 39)
“There is a time for expanding and a time for contraction; one provokes the other and the other calls for the return of the first… Never are we nearer the Light than when darkness is deepest.”
Swami Vivekananda, Sunbeams (Page 39)
“The fact is that it doesn’t matter if you are gambling to the point where it harms you, if you are drinking too much, if you are lost in your life and afraid to articulate even to yourself how unhappy you are, how fearful of the future, of death, of other people, of being poor, of not being good enough, sexy enough, thin enough, tough enough, famous enough, if you feel that you are not enough and that if you could only ‘X, Y, Z, then everything would be fine,’ I believe you are on the spectrum of addiction. By this definition: ‘Trying to solve an inner problem by outer means, in spite of negative consequences.'”
Russell Brand, Recovery (Page 221)
“What I used to think of as happiness was merely distraction from the pain. The pain of disconnection, of separateness from you. All longing, all yearning, all thirst, flung on unworthy surrogates, false idols, unsated by unworthy objects, still pulling us unwillingly back together.”
Russell Brand, Recovery (Page 208)
“Eagerly anticipating some future event, passionately imagining something you desire, looking forward to some happy scenario—as pleasurable as these activities might seem, they ruin your chance at happiness here and now. Locate that yearning for more, better, someday and see it for what it is: the enemy of your contentment. Choose it or your happiness. As Epictetus says, the two are not compatible.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 57)
“It is quite impossible to unite happiness with a yearning for what we don’t have. Happiness has all that it wants, and resembling the well-fed, there shouldn’t be hunger or thirst.”
Epictetus, Discourses, via The Daily Stoic (Page 57)
“‘Sought’ is from the verb to seek; I have always been looking for something. I see that now, for as long as I can recall I harboured fantasies of how some object or experience would heal me, would make me whole. Sometimes before Christmas I would be so euphoric at the prospect of the following day’s gifts that I’d vibrate until it felt like I might shape-shift. What was I imagining the millennium Falcon or whatever it was would bring? What was the inherent drive that was so fiercely engaged? I always felt these artefacts would bring completion. It was like I was born with the yearning to be whole and continually felt that each new object or encounter, particularly if enthusiastically heralded, would bring redemption.”
Russell Brand, Recovery (Page 194)
“If someone asks you how to write your name, would you bark out each letter? And if they get angry, would you then return the anger? Wouldn’t you rather gently spell out each letter for them? So then, remember in life that your duties are the sum of individual acts. Pay attention to each of these as you do your duty… just methodically complete your task.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, via The Daily Stoic (Page 56)
“We don’t tolerate typos in commercial products, and the market has the same feeling about design that’s lazy or out of place. Graphic design represents an emotional commitment to the work. Long before we read the words or understand the images, we see the layout. Kerning and color and weight and form arrive in our brains before we have decided what the words on the page actually mean. You wouldn’t wear a clown suit to a job interview, and yet people dress up their ideas in clown suits all the time.”
Seth Godin, Blog