“Losers make excuses; winners make progress. Now, how can you tell if your favorite excuse is valid or not? It’s simple. Look around and ask, ‘Is there anyone else who has my same excuse who is successful anyway?’ When you ask this question, if you are honest, you will have to admit that there are thousands and even millions of people who have had it far worse than you have who have gone on to do wonderful things with their lives. And what thousands and millions of others have done, you can do as well—if you try.”
Brian Tracy, via No Excuses! (Page 3)
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Unknown, via No Excuses! (Page 2)
“Healing ourselves isn’t about constantly feeling bliss, being attached to bliss is a bondage of its own. Trying to force ourselves to be happy is counterproductive, because it suppresses the sometimes tough reality of the moment, pushing it back within the depths of our being, instead of allowing it to arise and release. Healing ourselves is the personal movement we embark on to let go of all the conditioning that limits our freedom; in this journey there will undoubtedly be moments of bliss and difficulty. Real happiness and wisdom grow from the reality we experience, not from the fleeting moments of bliss that we feel.”
Yung Pueblo
“Your inner doom & gloom thoughts and feelings have no power over you unless you give it away. It’s possible to make mistakes and still be accepted and valued for who you are. It’s also possible to not be at your best and still make an impact. Hopefully, knowing this activates a sense of freedom that allows you to enjoy yourself more in all you do.”
Nat Couropmitree
“We are often drawn to chaotic romantic partners because their chaos guarantees that we will always feel needed. In contrast, dating someone with their shit together is, in some ways, terrifying—they are so functional and self-sufficient and self-contained, how could we ever know that they need us? The answer is: they don’t need us. Yet they choose to spend their life with us anyway. And that is far more powerful.”
Mark Manson
“Productivity is most important for things you don’t want to be doing. Most people want to increase productivity so they can spend less time on the task. But before you worry about being more productive, think about being more selective. Rather than focusing on increasing productivity, it may be worth asking, ‘What would I be delighted to spend time on, even if it went slowly?’ Direct your energy toward figuring out how to start what you want to do rather than thinking about how to shorten what you don’t want to do.”
James Clear
“I try to remind myself that having to stay late at the office to write, trying to push through on no sleep, is disrespectful to the craft. When I spend that extra time on my phone instead of going to bed, when I plan a trip or a week poorly, I am cheating my work, cheating my family. I’m doing something unfair to the stranger I happen to bump into. Mostly, I am cheating and harming myself. A 2017 study actually found that lack of sleep increases negative repetitive thinking. Abusing the body trains the mind to abuse itself.”
Ryan Holiday
“In my body and in my soul I realized that I greatly needed sin, I needed lust, vanity, the striving for goods, and I needed the most shameful despair to learn how to give up resistance, to learn how to love the world, to stop comparing the world with any world that I wish for, that I imagine, with any perfection that I think up; I learned how to let the world be as it is, and to love it and to belong to it gladly.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 125)
“The world, my friend, is not imperfect or developing slowly toward perfection. No, the world is perfect at every moment, all sin already contains grace, all youngsters already contain oldsters, all babies contain death, all the dying contain eternal life. It is not possible for any man to see how far along another man is on his way; Buddha is waiting in robbers and dicers, the robber is waiting in the Brahmin. In deep meditation it is possible to eliminate time, to see all past, all present, all developing life as coexisting, and everything is good, everything perfect, everything Brahma.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 125)
“Wisdom cannot be communicated. Wisdom that a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish. Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. We can find it, we can live it, we can be carried by it, we can work wonders with it, but we cannot utter it or teach it.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 124)
“Science can never win against art, and logic can never win against love. History can never win against myth, and reality is poor compared to dreams, very poor. So if you carry any idea against imagination, drop it. Because we all carry it—this age is very anti-imagination. People have been taught to be factual, realistic, empirical, and all sorts of nonsense. People should be more dreamy, more childlike, more ecstatic. People should be able to create euphoria. And only through that do you reach your original source.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 249)
“Slowly blossomed, slowly ripened in Siddhartha the insight, the knowledge of what wisdom actually is, what the goal of his long seeking was. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think the thought of oneness, to feel and breathe the oneness at every moment, in the midst of life. Slowly this blossomed in him, brightly emanated to him from Vasudeva’s old childlike face: harmony, knowledge of the eternal perfection of the world, smiling, oneness.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 114)
“What father, what teacher could shield [his son] from living his own life, soiling himself with life, burdening himself with guilt, drinking the better drink himself, finding his path himself? Do you really believe, dear friend, that anyone at all is spared this path? Perhaps your little son because you love him, because you would like to spare him pain and sorrow and disillusion? But even if you died for him ten times over, you could not take away even the tiniest bit of his destiny.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 106)
“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
Cormac McCarthy, No Country For Old Men
“[Siddhartha’s son] too is called, he too is of eternal life. But do we know then, you and I, to what he is called, to what path, to what deeds, to what sufferings? His sufferings will not be small, his heart is too hard and proud. Such hearts must suffer much, wander much, do much injustice, saddle themselves with many sins. You never force him, never beat him, never order him, becasue you know that soft is stronger than hard, water stronger than rock, love stronger than violence. Very good, I praise you. But is it not a mistake to your part to believe that you never force him, never punish him? Do you not bind him in bonds with your love? Do you not shame him daily and make things even harder for him with your kindness and patience? Do you not force him, the arrogant and pampered boy, to live in a hut with two old banana eaters, for whom even rice is a delicacy, whose thoughts cannot be his, whose hearts are old and silent and take a different course from his? Is he not forced by all this, not punished?”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 105)
“On many evenings, they sat together at the tree trunk by the bank, silently listening to the water, which was no water for them, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of eternal Becoming.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 95)
“One of the ferryman’s greatest virtues was that he knew how to listen like few other people. Without a word from Vasudeva, the speaker felt that the ferryman took in his words, silent, open, waiting, missing none, impatient for none, neither praising nor blaming, but only listening. Siddhartha felt what happiness it is to unburden himself to such a listener, to sink his own life into this listener’s heart, his own seeking, his own suffering.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 92)