“What’s required is the will to resist the urge to consume more and more since that strategy can only lead to the feeling of having more experiences left to consume.”
Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
“The dream forced me to realize that the most important thing in life to me is friendship and feeling-exchange with other people. I don’t need to have many acquaintances, but I require good friendships that involve a deep level of communication, whether it be an exchange of ideas or the simple joy of being together.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 133)
“Continually review in your mind those whom a particular anger took to extremes, those who reached the greatest heights of glory or disaster or enmity or any other sort of fortune. Then stop and think: where is it all now? Smoke and ashes, a story told or even a story forgotten. Think how worthless all this striving is: how much wiser to use the material given to you to make yourself in all simplicity just, self-controlled, obedient to the gods. The pride that prides itself on freedom from pride is the hardest of all to bear.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Page 120)
“A Stoic is not a scold. Nor are they a tyrant. We are strict with ourselves, tolerant with others. Our discipline is our discipline, as it should be. Our own struggles should keep us busy enough that we shouldn’t even consider getting up in other people’s business to fix theirs. Instead let’s meet others where they are, accept and love them as they are. Because anything else is outside our control.”
Ryan Holiday, Daily Stoic Blog
“One way to show status is by demonstrating how many resources you have. A bespoke suit, a huge graduation party, a fancy building… A bully who physically intimidates or an angry driver who cuts you off in traffic are each working to show their status and strength. But it’s also possible to demonstrate security and confidence by doing precisely the opposite. The billionaire in a t-shirt. The person who holds the door open and lets you go first in line… these are also demonstrations of status. The interesting question isn’t whether someone has status. It’s whether they’re gutsy enough to demonstrate it by making things better for others.”
Seth Godin, Blog
“It is not a good idea to try to make a ritual out of talking about your dream or trying to explain yourself to people. Talking tends to put the whole experience back on an abstract level. It gets contaminated with your desire to present yourself in the best light. Instead of a vivid, private experience, you wind up with an amorphous, collective chat. The best rituals are physical, solitary, and silent: These are the ones that register most deeply with the unconscious.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 99)
“That in a short while you will be nobody and nowhere; and the same of all that you now see and all who are now alive. It is the nature of all things to change, to perish and be transformed, so that in succession different things can come to be.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Page 119)
“If it is not right, don’t do it: if it is not true, don’t say it.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Page 118)
“If we never feel as though we’re enough, we can throw ourselves into our work to try and ascertain enough-ness from our output, usefulness and indispensability. But in doing so, we tend to head toward burnout — the more we do, the further away being enough feels.”
Jayne Hardy, TED Article
“A sure way for me to blunt my aliveness, my day-to-day experience of my vitality, is to live in victimhood, blame the weather, blame the traffic. What I notice is, if I stop blaming and I choose to move the locus of control back over here, and I choose to have agency, to be responsible for my experience, not the external world, but to be responsible for my experience, there’s a surge of energy that comes back in the body.”
Jim Dethmer
“Opt for the interpretation that teaches you something new, rather than one that seems to confirm your ingrained opinions and prejudices. remember, the main function of a dream is to communicate something to you that you don’t know, that you are unaware of, that lives in the unconscious. Your dream will not waste your time by telling you what you already know and understand; therefore, you should choose the interpretation that challenges your existing ideas rather than one that merely repeats what you already think you know.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 94)
“The process of inner growth demands that we examine consciously everything that motivates us.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 72)
“Look at causation stripped bare of its covers; look at the ulterior reference of any action. Consider, what is pain? What is pleasure? What is death? What is fame? Who is not himself the cause of his own unrest? Reflect how no one is hampered by any other; and that all is as thinking makes it so.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Page 117)
“You will never find anything in the unconscious that will not be useful and good when it is made conscious and brought to the right level.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 71)
“This is probably the single most important principle in dream work—the one that determines whether you will find the wisdom in your dreams. We have to recognize that dreams are intricate tapestries of symbolism, and each image represents something going on within our own selves.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 69)
“The unconscious has the habit of borrowing images from the external situation and using those images to symbolize something that is going on inside the dreamer. Your dream may borrow the image of your next-door neighbor, your spouse, or your parent and use that image to refer to something inside you.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 68)
“If you take your dreams as a reflection of the unconscious dynamics within you, you are most likely to get to the heart of the matter; if, however, you apply the dream on the external level, it usually turns out to be superficial. It is on the inner level that you can change life-patterns most profoundly; it is at the inner level that your dream is usually aimed.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 67)
“Our culture teaches us to focus on the external world, so we jump to the conclusion that our dreams are talking about something on the outside. This is a collective prejudice we suffer from: We spontaneously assume that only the outer world has any importance. The true significance of the inner world becomes more clear when we begin to realize that almost everything we do, every reaction we have, every decision we make, every relationship we form, ultimately results from our inner qualities and inner dynamics. Everything is controlled by the huge energy systems that propel us from within, that determine most of what we think and do.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 67)
“There was an old tradition in the Christian Church that one had not prayed unless one’s lips had moved. This idea expresses a psychological truth: Something physical has to happen. This is why it is so important that you write your examples down on paper. When you physically write those examples, the connections with your dream become clear and definite.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 66)