“Your obstacles are not rivers or mountains or other people; your obstacle is yourself.”
Xenophon, via The Daily Laws (Page 380)
“Life is battle and struggle, and you will constantly find yourself facing bad situations, destructive relationships, dangerous engagements. How you confront these difficulties will determine your fate. If you feel lost and confused, if you lose your sense of direction, if you cannot tell the difference between friend and foe, you have only yourself to blame. Everything depends on your frame of mind and on how you look at the world. A shift of perspective can transform you from a passive and confused mercenary into a motivated and creative fighter.”
Robert Greene, The Daily Laws (Page 380)
“People tend to hide their problems and to put their best face forward. We only see and hear of their triumphs, their new relationships, their brilliant ideas that will land them a gold mine. If we move closer—if we saw the quarrels that go on behind closed doors or the horrible boss that goes with that new job—we would have less reason to feel envy. Nothing is ever so perfect as it seems, and often we would see that we are mistaken if we only looked closely enough.”
Robert Greene, The Daily Laws (Page 377)
“Only in the storm can you see the art of the real sailor; only on the battlefield can you see the bravery of a soldier. The courage of a simple person can be seen in how he copes with the difficult and dangerous situations in life.”
Daniel Achinski, via A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 314)
“…The more civilized and moral we outwardly become, the more potentially dangerous is the Shadow, which we so fiercely deny. The solution is not more repression and correctness. We can never alter human nature through enforced niceness. The pitchfork doesn’t work. Nor is the solution to seek release for our Shadow in the group, which is volatile and dangerous. Instead the answer is to see our Shadow in action and become more self-aware. It is hard to project onto others our own secret impulses or to overidealize some cause, once we are made aware of the mechanism operating within us.”
Robert Greene, The Daily Laws (Page 376)
“Do not believe that in religion you cannot trust your intellect. The force of our intellect must support the foundations of every real faith.”
William Ellery Channing, via A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 313)
“Some problems lend themselves to reexamination. A second, third or even fourth thought is productive, because our initial impulses might not reflect our best effort at understanding the nuances of the situation. But many problems simply create more thoughts, without productive output. As we confront something that is unlikely to have a simple or productive way forward, it’s easy to go into a mental tizzy imagining solutions. The art is understanding which sort of problem we’re facing. And devoting the right amount of thought (not less and definitely not more) to the situation we’re in. Spending cycles on categorizing the problem is probably more productive than wasting time on problems that don’t deserve our effort.”
Seth Godin, Blog
“Create immediately an atmosphere of freedom so that you can live and find out for yourselves what is true, so that you are able to face the world with the ability to understand it, not just conform to it. One can tell for oneself whether the water is warm or cold. In the same way, a man must convince himself about these experiences, only then are they real.”
Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts (Page 208)
“The majority of people want to do something unusual and difficult in order to improve their lives, but they would be better to purify their wishes, and improve their inner selves.”
Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 312)
“You are angry. Let the feeling settle from within, and think about it. Was it triggered by something seemingly trivial or petty? That is a sure sign that something or someone else is behind it. Perhaps a more uncomfortable emotion is at the source—such as envy or paranoia. You need to look at this square in the eye. Dig below any trigger points to see where they started.”
Robert Greene, The Daily Laws (Page 374)
“Pushing your way through some critical choices now will probably pay off in far more good days later. How many good days later does hard decision work today earn us? Stalling costs us more than we expect. We get stressed from the act of stalling, and then later, we will have to pay the ongoing cost of putting off work and decisions that would have been easier and more profitable a while ago.”
Seth Godin, Blog
“When I left him, I reasoned thus with myself: I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.”
Socrates, via The Daily Laws (Page 373)
“Healing does not erase the past, and the point of healing is not to forget what has happened. Old memories from hard moments may come up even after deep healing has taken place, but what shifts is how we react to them when they arise. If the intensity of the reaction is decreasing, then real progress is being made. This has nothing to do with suppressing the reaction; it is just a measure of what is actually happening in the mind, It is possible to feel your truth without getting consumed by it or letting it control your behavior.”
Yung Pueblo
“Do not be afraid to bring out the more sensitive or ambitious sides to your character. These repressed parts of you are yearning to be let out. In the theater of life, expand the roles that you play. Don’t worry about people’s reactions to any changes in you they sense. You are not so easy to categorize, which will fascinate them and give you the power to play with their perceptions of you, altering them at will.”
Robert Greene, The Daily Laws (Page 372)
“The purpose of your life is not to do as the majority does, but to live according to the inner law which you understand in yourself. Do not act against your conscience or against truth. Live like this, and you will fulfill the task of your life.”
Marcus Aurelius, via A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 309)
“Sometimes it benefits us to be passive: to allow life to come to us and unfold without force. Other times it benefits us to be aggressive: to bend the world to our will and actively shape the life we want. Are you being too passive or too aggressive right now?”
James Clear, Blog
“The will to win is wasted if it is directed towards trivial affairs.”
James Clear, Blog
“If you’re sticking with a job, even though it’s making you miserable, because you think that grit is the same thing as character and that it is weak-willed to walk away from something—the problem is you forget that you’ll be walking towards something. And the thing that you would be walking towards could actually be a lot better. And so sticking has the associative cost of not just the misery you’re currently feeling in that horrible job but also all the happiness you could be gaining from the other things you could be doing.”
Annie Duke