“An event or a journey? They’re easy to confuse. An event happens at date certain, then it’s over, nothing more to be done. A journey might include an event, but it’s bigger than that, and ongoing. A wedding is an event, a marriage is a journey. The week a book is published is an event, while the creation, publication and lifespan of the ideas in the book are a journey. The focus and energy we lavish on events can easily distract us from the journeys we care about.”
Seth Godin, Blog
“The problem that many of us face is that we have great dreams and ambitions. Caught up in the emotions of our dreams and the vastness of our desires, we find it very difficult to focus on the small, tedious steps usually necessary to attain them. We tend to think in terms of giant leaps toward our goals. But in the social world as in nature, anything of size and stability grows slowly.”
Robert Greene, 33 Strategies of War
“Don’t listen at what people say. Don’t look at people’s appearances. Look at people’s actions, and the patterns of their behavior. For instance, I talk about Howard Hughes in [The Laws of Human Nature] as somebody who’s got a very weak character, who was a horrific businessman. People were lured in by his image of this sort of maverick aviator, a great Hollywood person, et cetera. But if you looked at the patterns of his behavior, you would have seen that he was actually quite toxic. So stop looking at what people say about themselves. Look at their actions.”
Robert Greene, Daily Stoic YouTube
“Failure to read what is happening in another’s soul is not easily seen as a cause of unhappiness: but those who fail to attend to the motions of their own soul are necessarily unhappy.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Page 12)
“Three standout qualities [that a healthy relationship can be built on] are: humility, being open to feedback, and being in touch with their emotions. Humility is necessary because without it, growth is not possible. Being open to feedback is valuable because through mutual honesty you create a safe and vibrant home together. Being in touch with your emotions is needed because you need to know/accept yourself deeply to be able to love your partner well.”
Yung Pueblo
“Say to yourself first thing in the morning: today I shall meet people who are meddling, ungrateful, aggressive, treacherous, malicious, unsocial. All this has afflicted them through their ignorance of true good and evil. But I have seen that the nature of good is what is right, and the nature of evil what is wrong; and I have reflected that the nature of the offender himself is akin to my own—not a kinship of blood or seed, but a sharing in the same mind, the same fragment of divinity. Therefore I cannot be harmed by any of them, as none will infect me with their wrong. Nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him. We were born for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. So to work in opposition to one another is against nature: and anger or rejection is opposition.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Page 10)
“You’re not trying to become non attached. You’re trying to move towards non attachment every time you get scared of a loss. For most people, they’ve never been non attached for one second in their whole life. So even the fact that they can move towards that is helpful for them. So the goal is not to become completely non attached. No. It’s work towards no one person, place, or thing leaving you can completely take away your whole existence and your sense of wholeness.”
Phil Stutz, Stutz
“Reputation is invaluable. Freedom and independence are invaluable. Family and friends are invaluable. Being loved by those who you want to love you is invaluable. Happiness is invaluable. And your best shot at keeping these things is knowing when it’s time to stop taking risks that might harm them. Knowing when you have enough.”
Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money
“All the things you’re worried about potentially happening in the future are in fact happening right now somewhere in the world. All the things you’re not sure you could handle… people have been handling since the beginning of time. Nothing new looms, only reruns of what you’ve already experienced or read about in the annals of history.”
Ryan Holiday, Daily Stoic Blog
“The Grateful Flow is not the things you’re grateful for. The Grateful Flow is the process of creating these things. So close your eyes. Now, what you want to do is you say two or three, at most four, things you’re grateful for. The smaller the thing, the better, because it forces you to concentrate gratefulness. You wanna do it nice and slow. You want to feel the gratefulness. The next thing you do is you feel that you’re going to create another grateful thought, but you don’t. You block it. So all you feel is the force that would create a grateful thought, and as it gets stronger and stronger, you feel taken over by it. That’s the Grateful Flow.”
Phil Stutz, Stutz
“Men seek retreats for themselves—in the country, by the sea, in the hills—and you yourself are particularly prone to this yearning. But all this is quite unphilosophic, when it is open to you, at any time you want, to retreat into yourself. No retreat offers someone more quiet and relaxation than that into his own mind, especially if he can dip into thoughts there which put him at immediate and complete ease: and by ease I simply mean a well-ordered life. So constantly give yourself this retreat, and renew yourself. The doctrines you will visit there should be few and fundamental, sufficient at one meeting to wash away all your pain and send you back free of resentment at what you must rejoin.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (pag xxxv)
“For Marcus [Aurelius] philosophy was the therapy of the soul. In this sense, his Meditations are his medications.”
Diskin Clay, via Meditations (pag xxxiii)
“For a philosopher seeking to guide himself repetition is a philosophical virtue. Repetition is a form of spiritual exercise designed to reinforce the main principles of Marcus [Aurelius]’ philosophy; its purpose is to effect a ‘dyeing of the soul.'”
Diskin Clay, via Meditations (pag xviii)
“The sun is always up there. The cloud is always over here, blocking the sun. If you can’t break through, you think it’s a very bad day. In fact, you think it’s a very bad life. Part X wants you to have the negative flow, so it’ll create the cloud up there so you can’t see the sun. You forget that it’s actually sunny up there. The question becomes, ‘How do you penetrate the cloud?’ And the answer is, ‘With gratefulness.'”
Phil Stutz, Stutz
“Parkinson’s has made me aware of time. Like, really aware of it. My sense of mission, my sense of this is what I’m supposed to do, that got much stronger in me. If I don’t do that, I start to think about, ‘Oh, shit, this happened to me. What a drag.’ You know, it makes life harder. Then you go into this whole pity party thing. It’s a complete waste of time.”
Phil Stutz, Stutz
“The average person wants to get paid back. They want everything to be fair. They want everything to be balanced. But you’re not gonna get it from them. The way you feel you’re getting paid, the way you feel things are being rebalanced, is to get your satisfaction from the exercise [forgiveness/ letting go/ love] itself. That’s called Active Love.”
Phil Stutz, Stutz
“We think that perfecting the outward version of ourselves that the world sees will bring us the inner peace we want. But Socrates and the Stoics knew it was the other way around. It’s the inner work that is more likely to bring us the outward success. And more importantly, that the inner work was an end unto itself.”
Ryan Holiday, Daily Stoic Blog
“Before I met you, I’m this, like, wildly insecure kid, and I think success and awards will absolve me of the pain of life. So I work so hard to get to that Snapshot, and because of my privilege and luck, I got to go into that Snapshot relatively early, and when it didn’t cure any of that stuff, it made me beyond depressed.”
Jonah Hill, Stutz