“People ask me, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’ There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron… If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.”
George Mallory, Climbing Everest
“Every single qualification for success is acquired through habit. People form habits and habits form futures. If you do not deliberately form good habits, then unconsciously you will form bad ones. You are the kind of person you are because you have formed the habit of being that kind of person, and the only way you can change is through habit.”
Albert Gray, The Common Denominator of Success
“‘You’re probably right’ has become of my favorite phrases. Whenever someone disagrees with you on a small matter (read: most things), you can shrug, say ‘you’re probably right’ and move on. Not caring about winning trivial arguments saves so much time and energy.”
James Clear, Blog
“Only if you realize you are responsible do you have the freedom to create yourself the way you want to be, not as a reaction to the situations in which you exist. Reactivity is enslavement. Responsibility is freedom. When you are able to create yourself the way you want, you can create your life the way you want as well. Your outer life may not be a hundred percent in your control, but your inner life always will.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 53)
“Whenever we have had to do something about our lives, we have taken it into our hands. Whenever it comes to other people’s misfortunes, we have a word to explain it: destiny. And what a convenient word that is. Destiny has become a popular scapegoat, a way to deal with failure, a fatalistic ruse to reconcile ourselves to all kinds of uncomfortable situations. But turning inward is the first step from passivity to agency—from being a victim toward becoming a master of your own destiny.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 40)
“Most people think peace and joy are the goals of the spiritual life. This is a fallacy. Peace and joy are the basic requirements for a life of well-being. If you want to enjoy your dinner tonight, you must be peaceful and happy. If you want to enjoy your family, the work that you do, the world that you live in, you must must be peaceful and happy. Peace and joy are not things you attain at the end of life. They are the basis of your life. If you consider peace to be the ultimate goal, you will only ‘rest in peace’!
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 33)
“Put simply, our inner ecology is a mess. Somehow we think that fixing outer conditions will make everything okay on the inside. But these past 150 years are proof that technology will only bring comfort and convenience to us, not well-being. We need to understand that unless we do the right things, the right things will not happen to us: this is true not just of the outside world, but also the inside.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 30)
“Why do you need to be pleasant within? The answer is self-evident. When you are in a pleasant inner state, you are naturally pleasant to everyone and everything around you. No scripture or philosophy is needed to instruct you to be good to others. It is a natural outcome when you are feeling good within yourself. Inner pleasantness is a surefire insurance for the making of a peaceful society and a joyful world.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 27)
“Well-being is just a deep sense of pleasantness within. If your body feels pleasant, we call this health. If it becomes very pleasant, we call this pleasure. If your mind becomes pleasant, we call this peace. If it becomes very pleasant, we call this joy. If your emotions become pleasant, we call this love. If they become very pleasant, we call this compassion. If your life energies become pleasant, we call this bliss. If they become very pleasant, we call this ecstasy. This is all that you are seeking: pleasantness within and without. When pleasantness is within, it is termed peace, joy, happiness. When your surroundings become pleasant, it gets branded success. If you’re not interested in any of this and want to go to heaven, what are you seeking? Just otherworldly success! So, essentially all human experience is only a question of pleasantness and unpleasantness in varying degrees.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 26)
“There is something within every human being that dislikes boundaries, that is longing to become boundless. Human nature is such that we always yearn to be something more than what we are right now. No matter how much we achieve, we still want to be something more. If we just looked at this closely, we would realize that this longing is not for more; this longing is for all. We are all seeking to become infinite. The only problem is that we are seeking it in installments.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 23)
“If you really want to know spirituality, don’t look for anything. People think spirituality is about looking for God or truth or the ultimate. The problem is you have already defined what you are looking for. It is not the object of your search that is important; it is the faculty of looking. The ability to simply look without motive is missing in the world today. Everybody is a psychological creature, wanting to assign meaning to everything. Seeking is not about looking for something. It is about enhancing your perception, your very faculty of seeing.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 15)
It has always seemed to me odd that the world does not realize the immensity of a state of ‘I do not know.’ Those who destroy that state with beliefs and assumptions completely miss an enormous possibility—the possibility of knowing. They forget that ‘I do not know’ is the doorway—the only doorway—to seeking and knowing.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 12)
“The truth is timeless, but the technology and the language are always contemporary. If they weren’t, they would deserve to be discarded. No tradition, however time-honored, deserves to live on as anything more than a museum piece if it has outlived its relevance.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 5)
“There’s a thing that worries me sometimes when you talk about creativity because it can have this kind of feel that it’s just nice, or warm, or pleasant—it’s not. It’s vital. It’s the way we heal each other. In singing our song, in telling our story, in inviting you to say, ‘Hey, listen to me and I’ll listen to you,’ we’re starting a dialog. And when you do that this healing happens. And we come out of our corners. And we start to witness each other’s common humanity. We start to assert it. And when we do that? Really good things happen.”
Ethan Hawke, TED
“I believe that we are here—on this star is space—to help one another. And first, we have to survive. And then we have to thrive. And to thrive—to express ourselves—we have to know ourselves. What do you love? If you get close to what you love, who you are will be revealed to you—and it expands.”
Ethan Hawke, TED
“Do you need to give yourself permission to do something big for your special year? Just imagine, as an alternative, spending the rest of your life being dragged behind the Great Dane of your overcommitments to others. For five minutes it’s cute. Over a lifetime, it destroys what’s best in you and what’s unique about you. If you don’t care about that, it’s too bad. Maybe they got you, all those voices working away from the time you were a little [child], trying to convince you that your only needs were to meet other people’s needs. But I think you do care. A lot.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 151)
“All kinds of strange things happened to shape you as you were growing up. Your parents pushed you. Or they ignored you. Your mother was overinvolved. Or your father was underinvolved. Your older sister was bossy. Or your younger brother was bratty. Your family had too much money. Or not enough money. But none of these things that happened to you are you. Otherwise you and I would be nothing more than the pretzels fate twisted us into when the dough of the self was still soft.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 149)
“Every couple of years a farmer lets his fields go fallow so the soil can replenish itself. Why should we be any different?”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 127)
“We can’t play out the stories of our lives according to the script other people have for us. That script may say we can’t get anything we need unless we’re sick. But you and I know that a life can be sick even when the mind and body are healthy. And sometimes the only way to heal a life is to give yourself the gift of a year in which you have an adventure where you make a dream come true. So what if you have to fight to win the freedom to give yourself that? Suppose you don’t do it. You’ll regret it forever.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 117)
“If you let fear be a reason not to explore what life has to offer, you will never explore what life has to offer. A little shiver of fear is a necessary price you must pay to give yourself the gift of a year that involves trying something new. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. If you’re not trembling just a little bit, you’re not really venturing anything either. Sometimes the best thing you can do is to remember to not be afraid of fear.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 117)