“A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune. I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which he is totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make another you. One’s enough.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sunbeams (Page 21)
“I have met on the street a very poor man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.”
Victor Hugo, Sunbeams (Page 21)
“We do not remember days, we remember moments.”
Cesare Pavese, Sunbeams (Page 21)
“The more things we desire and the more we have to do to earn or attain those achievements, the less we actually enjoy our lives—and the less free we are.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 33)
“The accident would always make me think of the Apache women, and of all the decisions that go into making a life—the choices people make, together and on their own, that combine to produce any single event. Grains of sand, incalculable, pressing into sediment, then rock.”
Tara Westover, Educated (Page 40)
“The past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
Virginia Woolf, via Educated
“If there is any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not deter or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again.”
William Penn, Sunbeams (Page 20)
“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in each man’s life a sorrow and a suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sunbeams (Page 19)
“All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sunbeams (Page 19)
“Money only marginally changes life. It doesn’t solve the problems that people without it seem to think it will. In fact, no material possession will. External things can’t fix internal issues.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 31)
“This comes up all the time in mechanical work. A hang-up. You just sit and stare and think, and go search randomly for new information, and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge.”
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, via Sunbeams (Page 18)
“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, day and night, to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight… It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”
E. E. Cummings, via More Myself (Page 251)
“I don’t have to fit in. None of us does. Our uniqueness isn’t a scar, but a beauty mark. What makes us different is also what makes us wildly, boldly, and marvelously who we were born to be.”
Alicia Keys, More Myself (Page 250)
“There is a field where all wonderful perfections of microscope and telescope fail. All exquisite niceties of weights and measure as well as that which is behind them, the keen and driving power of the mind. No facts, however indubitably detected, no effort or reason, however magnificently maintained, can prove that Bach’s music is beautiful.”
Edith Hamilton, Sunbeams (Page 17)
“We have to be utterly broken before we can realize that it is impossible to better the truth. It is the truth that we deny which so tenderly and forgivingly picks up the fragments and puts them together again.”
Laurens Van der Post, Sunbeams (Page 17)
“Be like the bird, pausing in his flight
On limb too slight,
Feels it give way, yet sings,
Knowing he has wings.”
Victor Hugo, Sunbeams (Page 17)
“True love has no object. Many speak of their unconditional love for another. Unconditional love is the experience of being; there is no ‘I’ and ‘other,’ and anyone or anything it touches is experienced in love. You cannot unconditionally love someone. You can only be unconditional love. It is not a dualistic emotion. It is a sense of oneness with all that is. The experience of love arises when we surrender our separateness into the universal. It is a feeling of unity. You don’t love another, you are another. There is no fear because there is no separation.”
Stephen Levine, Who Dies?, via Sunbeams (Page 15)
“Your principles can’t be extinguished unless you snuff out the thoughts that feed them, for it’s continually in your power to reignite new ones… It’s possible to start living again! See things anew as you once did—that is how to restart life!”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, via The Daily Stoic (Page 28)
“In life, we don’t get what we ask for. We get what we believe. And what we believe about ourselves shows up in our energy. It’s how we walk into a room. It’s how we communicate, through body language, I don’t deserve to be here. It’s whether we sit up straight or hide out in the back of a meeting. At times, my own energy has been saying, ‘I’m cool with the bare minimum. Don’t give me more.’ Without knowing it, I stunted my growth because I was scared to be magnificent and doubtful that I was. It’s possible to say you want a grand life but then continue to play small.”
Alicia Keys, More Myself (Page 249)
“I feared that if I shared my experience in its entirety, if I took the lid off my joy, it would push others away or make them feel small. As my career progressed, that tendency took another form in my interactions around the industry. I don’t need much. Nothing has to be too grand. I’m cool with my little piano, my bench, and a cup of water. In a sense, that was true. I’ve never been an over-the-top kind of girl. But what’s also true is this: Some part of my spirit was always signing up for less because that is what I believed I deserved. For many years, I thought I was being modest. I never wanted to come across as self-absorbed, or as someone with a big head. It’s how we women are brought up: Don’t ask for more. Don’t take credit. Don’t outshine others. But there on the couch, it hit me that my alleged modesty was just a disguise—a mask for a lack of self-worth.”
Alicia Keys, More Myself (Page 248)