“For me, success is not a public thing. It’s a private thing. It’s when you have fewer and fewer regrets.”
Toni Morrison, The Guardian
“Make yourself invulnerable to your dependency on comfort and convenience, or one day your vulnerability might bring you to your knees.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 287)
“Show me someone who isn’t a slave! One is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to power, and all are slaves to fear. I could name a former Consul who is a slave to a little old woman, a millionaire who is the slave of the cleaning woman… No servitude is more abject than the self-imposed.”
Seneca, via The Daily Stoic (Page 287)
“Being unexpected adds to the weight of a disaster, and being a surprise has never failed to increase a person’s pain. For that reason, nothing should ever be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent out in advance to all things and we shouldn’t just consider the normal course of things, but what could actually happen. For is there anything in life that Fortune won’t knock off its high horse if it pleases her?”
Seneca, via The Daily Stoic (Page 286)
“Training in the martial arts or combat is a deeply thoughtful study of movement. We sometimes think of soldiers as automatons, but what they’ve actually built is a steady pattern of unconscious behaviors. Any of us can build these.”
Ryan Holiday, via The Daily Stoic (Page 285)
“Upon the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that, upon other fields, on other days will bear the fruits of victory.”
Douglass MacArthur, via The Daily Stoic (Page 282)
“It is more worthy in the eyes of God… if a writer makes three pages sharp and funny about the lives of geese than to make three hundred fat and flabby about God or the American people.”
Garrison Keillor, via Sunbeams (Page 134)
“If one can actually revert to the truth, then a great deal of one’s suffering can be erased—because a great deal of one’s suffering is based on sheer lies.”
R. D. Laing, via Sunbeams (Page 134)
“The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, because an artful life requires being prepared to meet and withstand sudden and unexpected attacks.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, via The Daily Stoic (Page 282)
“The point is not to have an iron will, but an adaptable will—a will that makes full use of reason to clarify perception, impulse, and judgment to act effectively for the right purpose. It’s not weak to change and adapt. Flexibility is its own kind of strength. In fact, this flexibility combined with strength is what will make us resilient and unstoppable.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 281)
“Nature is merciful and does not try her children, man or beast, beyond their compass. It is only when the cruelty of man intervenes that hellish torments appear. For the rest—live dangerously; take things as they come; dread naught, all will be well.”
Winston Churchill, via The Daily Stoic (Page 280)
“The Stoic does two things when encountering hatred or ill opinion in others. They ask: Is this opinion inside my control? If there is a chance for influence or change, they take it. But if there isn’t, they accept this person as they are (and never hate a hater). Our job is tough enough already. We don’t have time to think about what other people are thinking, even if it’s about us.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 279)
“You’ve got stuff in your head that no one else has got. And you’ve got stuff in your head that you think you bear alone, but I PROMISE you share with so many. Only way to know the difference is to spill it out. On paper, into a mic, to a shrink, onto a canvas.”
Lin-Manuel Miranda, Gmorning, Gnight
“Anyone can get lucky. There’s no skill in being oblivious, and no one would consider that greatness. On the other hand, the person who perseveres through difficulties, who keeps going when others quit, who makes it to their destination through hard work and honesty? That’s admirable, because their survival was the result of fortitude and resilience, not birthright or circumstance. A person who overcame not just the external obstacles to success but mastered themselves and their emotions along the way? That’s much more impressive. The person who has been dealt a harder hand, understood it, but still triumphed? That’s greatness.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 278)
“When you drop the struggle with shame and accept life as it is without judgment, you find great freedom on the other side. It is freedom to be who you are, exactly as you are. The only real meaning in life is found in being who you are right now, without apologies. You don’t need to be more spiritual, richer, friendlier, better looking, younger, or living on a beach. In this moment, all you need to be is you. Only in that space will you find lasting contentment.”
Alan Downs, The Velvet Rage
“Belonging so fully to yourself that you’re willing to stand alone is a wilderness—an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching. It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, a place as sought after as it is feared. The wilderness can often feel unholy because we can’t control it, or what people think about our choice of whether to venture into that vastness or not. But it turns out to be the place of true belonging, and it’s the bravest and most sacred place you will ever stand.”
Brené Brown, Braving The Wildnerness
“Try praying differently, and see what happens: Instead of asking for ‘a way to sleep with her,’ try asking for ‘a way to stop desiring to sleep with her.’ Instead of ‘a way to get rid of him,’ try asking for ‘a way to not crave his demise.’ Instead of ‘a way to not lose my child,’ try asking for ‘a way to lose my fear of it.'”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, via The Daily Stoic (Page 276)
“Overconfidence is a great weakness and a liability. But if you are already humble, no one will need to humble you—and the world is much less likely to have nasty surprises in store for you. If you stay down to earth, no one will need to bring you—oftentimes crushingly so—back down.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 274)
“Let us get used to dining out without the crowds, to being a slave to fewer slaves, to getting clothes only for their real purpose, and to living in more modest quarters.”
Seneca, On Tranquility Of Mind, via The Daily Stoic (Page 271)
“Over the years, I’ve learned that the first idea you have is irrelevant. It’s just a catalyst for you to get started. Then you figure out what’s wrong with it and you go through phases of denial, panic, regret. And then you finally have a better idea and the second idea is always the important one.”
Arthur van Hoff, Founders at Work