“If you’re a part of a shitty relationship, you owe it to yourself to move on. You owe it to yourself to be happy with the relationships you have. You are in control. Besides, moving on is sometimes the best way to develop new, empowering relationships. Starting anew, empty-handed and full-hearted, you can build fresher, stronger, more supportive relationships—important relationships that allow you to have fun and be happy and contribute beyond yourself. These are the meaningful relationships we all need.” ~ The Minimalists, Everything That Remains
“When a relationship is birthed out of convenience or proximity or chemistry alone, it is bound to fail. We need more than a person’s physical presence to maintain a meaningful connection, but we routinely keep people around because… well, simply because they’re already around.” ~ The Minimalists, Everything That Remains
“Understand, every moth is drawn to light, even when that light is a flame, hot and burning, flickering, the fire tantalizing the drab creature with its blueish-white illumination. But when the moth flies too close to the flame, we all know what happens: it gets burned, incinerated by the very thing that drew it near. For decades now, I have played the role of the moth, lured by the flame of consumerism, pop culture’s beautiful conflagration, a firestorm of lust and greed and wanting, a haunting desire to consume that which cannot be consumed, to be fulfilled by that which can never be fulfilling. A vacant proposition, leaving me empty inside, which further fuels my desire to consume. Accepting the flame for what it is, then, is important: it is necessary and beautiful and, most of all, dangerous. Realizing this, becoming aware of the danger, is difficult to do. But this is how we wake up.” ~ The Minimalists, Everything That Remains
“The more action you take, the more you want to take action.” ~ The Minimalists, Everything That Remains
“The first jump – that’s the most difficult part. Because you’ll always have some people who say things like, ‘Why would you do that?’ or ‘How can you do that?’ or ‘If you could do that thing you want to do – write that novel or become an entrepreneur or travel the world or whatever – then everyone would be doing it.’ It’s important to remember that these naysayers are just projecting. It’s that ingrained fear we all have, a natural instinct. We tend to be afraid of bucking the status quo. But when you do take that first jump, it actually becomes terrifying to do ‘normal’ things, because you realize what a risk it is to give up your entire life just to be normal.” ~ The Minimalists, Everything That Remains
“Our possessions possess us. All the things I owned kept the back of my mind activated. I used to sit around and feel weighted down by all the stuff in my life. I’d worry about everything I had, thinking ‘I’ve got this much, so now I need more – I need to level it out: I have the TV, so I need the DVD player; I have the garage, so I need a nice car to fill it; I have this, so I need that.’ It’s a never-ending cycle, a cold war with yourself.” ~ Colin Wright, via Everything That Remains
“What you don’t do determines what you can do.” ~ Tim Ferriss, via James Clear’s Blog
“Desire always begets more desire. And thus the American Dream is a misnomer, a broken shiny thing, like a new car without an engine. There is blood on the flag, our blood, and in today’s world of achieving and earning and endlessly striving for more, the American Dream really just seems to imply that we are fat and in debt, discontented and empty, every man an island, leaving a void we attempt to fill with more stuff.” ~ The Minimalists, Everything That Remains
“Everyone is attempting to buy what no one can sell.” ~ The Minimalists, Everything That Remains
“It seems we don’t know how to love the ones we love until they disappear from our lives.” ~ The Minimalists, Everything That Remains
“All great men and women went through difficulties to get to where they are, all of them made mistakes. They found within those experiences some benefit – even if it was simply the realization that they were not infallible and that things would not always go their way. They found that self-awareness was the way out and through – if they hadn’t, they wouldn’t have gotten better and they wouldn’t have been able to rise again.” ~ Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy
“Almost universally, the traits or behaviors that have pissed us off in other people – their dishonesty, their selfishness, their laziness – are hardly going to work out well for them in the end. Their ego and shortsightedness contains its own punishment. The question we must ask ourselves is: Are we going to be miserable just because other people are?” ~ Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy
“Hate at any point is a cancer that gnaws away at the very vital center of your life and your existence. It is like eroding acid that eats away the best and the objective center of your life.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr., via Ego is the Enemy
“Attempting to destroy something out of hate or ego often ensures that it will be preserved and disseminated forever.” ~ Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy
“Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of – that’s the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. Winning is not enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.” ~ Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy
“If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.” ~ Emile Zola, via Ego is the Enemy
“The more you have and do, the harder maintaining fidelity to your purpose will be, but the more critically you will need to. Everyone buys into the myth that if only they had that – usually what someone else has – they would be happy. It may take getting burned a few times to realize the emptiness of this illusion. We all occasionally find ourselves in the middle of some project or obligation and can’t understand why we’re there. It will take courage and faith to stop yourself.” ~ Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy
“Too often, convinced of our own intelligence, we stay in a comfort zone that ensures that we never feel stupid (and are never challenged to learn or reconsider what we know). It obscures from view various weakness in our understanding, until eventually it’s too late to change course. This is where the silent toll is taken.” ~ Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy
“Do you know how you can tell when someone is truly humble? I believe there’s one simple test: because they consistently observe and listen, the humble improve. They don’t assume, ‘I know the way.'” ~ Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy
“Success is intoxicating, yet to sustain it requires sobriety. We can’t keep learning if we think we already know everything. We cannot buy into myths we make ourselves, or the noise and chatter of the outside world. We must understand that we are a small part of an interconnected universe. On top of all this, we have to build an organization and a system around what we do – one that is about the work and not about us.” ~ Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy