“We generally save [expression of love] for special occasions, forgetting that love, which is the most precious form of human sustenance, is needed daily. We tend to grow amorous when we need love rather than when we sense that others need it. We are upset and annoyed by another person’s request for our love, feeling that it insults our emotional integrity; when in fact it is usually a healthy invasion of the coldness and distance which guard our egocentric lives. Victims of a romantic illusion which is itself a form of selfish crudeness, we ignore the fact that love can and should be offered by the mind and will as well as by the inspired emotions. By omitting the regular expression of love, we alienate ourselves from the common channels of understanding and sympathy with our fellows, and thus indeed with the sources of inspired emotion as well. We would do well to remember that small children, who express love and appeal for it many times each day, are in this not different from our own inner selves.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 89)
“We generally have a volcanic attitude toward our own intrafamily annoyances and frustrations, not expressing them openly until they have grown so strong that it is impossible either to put them sensibly or hold them back. The eruption usually either provokes or occurs during a family squabble, when all parties involved have lost their tempers or are scared stiff. At these times no one listens carefully, and criticisms are exaggerated; we tend to characterize the actions which upset us, not as temporary and reparable failings, but as the products or ingrained vice or genetic debility. Thus expressed, our anger not only fails to correct disorder but rather becomes an injury which prolongs it. To say that we lack self-control is not enough. What we lack is the courage and providence to have expressed ourselves sooner.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 88)
“People who make moral compromises in order to achieve good ends find that their compromises irrevocably alter the ends achieved. Thus they learn that, in a world of process, it is method rather than goal which carries the burden of moral value; that in the final analysis nothing should be mistaken either for a means or for an end.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 80)
“Written history is composed of actions; real history is actions compounded invisibly with refusals to act.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 68)
“Every home should have a room, or at least a nook with two chairs, where it is a sin punishable by immediate expulsion to speak of money, business, politics or the state of one’s teeth.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 59)
“The birth of our second child is one, maybe two weeks away. The coming event looms over us, the way a big wave looms over a little boat; and our days are dimmed by its shadow. The future can exert this force upon us, can totally suck the juice out of the present, turning it into something tense, dry, useless to memory. How can we enjoy or profit from usch a transitional state? The practical answer is ‘Don’t sit and wait; prepare.’ The subtler answer is that no period in life is more or less transitional than any other, had we only the power to understand each.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 41)
“The mind loves to jump to conclusions because it is more familiar with tension than with peace. If you want peace, you will ask for clear information instead of letting your mind run into half-truths and speculation. When you understand how empty thoughts are, they start to lose their power and control over your actions.”
Yung Pueblo
“To those of us who spend entire days, if not lifetimes, concentrating on a series of brief and insignificant things, the present has barely any meaning at all; we become tiny timorous things, caught in the inch of space between the ‘in’ box and the ‘out’ box. While we may share the common illusions about a mobile present and a free fuutre, we spend most of our lives housecleaning the past—maintaining commitments, counterbalancing errors, living up to expectations, mopping up our own postponements. In this sense, as in others, we shuffle backward into the future, unaware of our enslavement to time or of the simple freedom of new beginnings.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 39)
“Because we believe that one moment is more or less like the next, we lose touch with the essential urgency of the present, the fact that each passing moment is the one moment for the practice of freedom.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 38)
“You have a day to spare and wish to use it well. You see yourself in a kind of compartment of time whose immediate walls are last night’s and tonight’s sleep. Look beyond these walls and back at the present from imaginary mirrors placed in the past and the future. Think of the choices and events which brought you where you are; think of what you once wished or expected to have achieved by this point. Imagine what you will think of this period some time in the future. Will you think or do anything today that is worthy of future memory? Try to make the present memorable; or, failing this, review daily what is important about the present period in your life. In so doing you will enrich time.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 26)
Focusing on inner peace can give you stability, adaptability, maturity, self-awareness, mental clarity, better decision-making, the power of choice instead of impulsiveness and much more, but it does not give you an external environment that no longer has challenges or a mind that is void of all negativities.
Yung Pueblo
“Our days and our lives are pathetically shortened by miscellaneous abuses and confusions of time. We are novices at the art of making plans and have trouble remembering the plans we have made. We ignore the time that is open to us. We diminish ourselves by wishing time to pass. We are, for the most part, incapable of real concentration. Our days are broken by distraction, scrambled up into muddles of chores, errands, impulses, evasions, interruptions and delays, besotted with routine. We characteristically fail to see the ways in which a given period can be expanded, deepened and slowed by the exercise of will and awareness. Deprived of this power and isolated from continuity, we often feel small, momentary, almost transparent, like paper-thin façades of being.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 20)
“Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.”
John Green, Everything is Tuberculosis
“Each day is a minor eternity of over 86,000 seconds. During each second, the number of distinct molecular functions going on within the human body is comparable to the number of seconds in the estimated age of the cosmos. A few seconds are long enough for a revolutionary idea, a startling communication, a baby’s conception, a wounding insult, a sudden death. Depending on how we think of them, our lives can be infinitely long or infinitely short.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 7)
“Intentionally create a loving relationship between you and yourself. How you treat yourself can easily become how you treat your partner. Loving another person is greatly shaped by how strong your self-love is. The way you accept yourself, talking to yourself gently in your mind, not forcing yourself to be perfect, all the ways that you activate your self-love, will end up framing the shape of your relationship.”
Yung Pueblo