“Modern marketing culture is designed to amplify our desires. To turn faint wants into desperate needs. As a result, we’re intimately familiar with what we want. And we strive to get it. The problem with getting what you want is that now you have a hole, because you don’t want that thing anymore, you have it. We then are on a cycle, eager to find a new thing to want. Which means that the thing you used to want but now have fades in comparison. There’s a more resilient path: To commit to wanting what you have.”
Seth Godin
“One of the most satisfying feelings I know — and also one of the most growth-promoting experiences for the other person — comes from my appreciating this individual in the same way that I appreciate a sunset. People are just as wonderful as sunsets if I can let them be. In fact, perhaps the reason we can truly appreciate a sunset is that we cannot control it. When I look at a sunset as I did the other evening, I don’t find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a little on the right hand corner, and put a bit more purple along the base, and use a little more pink in the cloud color.’ I don’t do that. I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch it with awe as it unfolds. I like myself best when I can appreciate my staff member, my son, my daughter, my grandchildren, in this same way.”
Carl Rogers
“You slept on a slender pallet that night in Vegas. I was supposed to be sleeping next to you but I couldn’t because I was so happy. Your snores reminded me that you were alive. If you were alive and next to me, I had everything in the world I could ever want.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 3)
“We can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum. We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 277)
“Gratitude [is] the feeling of appreciation that comes when you recognize that something is valuable to you, which has nothing to do with its monetary worth.”
David Steindl-Rast, via Think Like A Monk (Page 205)
“Simple pleasures are just as transformative as extravagant experiences—so long as you remember how to enjoy them. I keep going back to this more than anything right now: the power of a dandelion, a blade of grass, a crisp breeze. We have forgotten how necessary these things are, and how important they are to our quality of life. We have forgotten about the very things that are right outside our own window. When you see something long enough, it becomes invisible—but, one of the best things you can do for yourself? Is to remember how to see. And sometimes, being in a small town does exactly that: gives you a more intimate lens with which to see the world around you. And to remind yourself that—no matter how overwhelming your world has gotten? There’s a gentle one waiting for you right here.”
Ash Ambirge
“The friend, the enemy: both are your imagination. When you stop imagination completely, you are alone, absolutely alone. Once you understand that life and all its relationships are imagination, you don’t go against life, but your understanding helps you to make your relationships richer. Now that you know that relationships are imagination, why not put more imagination into them? Why not enjoy them as deeply as possible? When the flower is nothing but your imagination, why not create a beautiful flower? Why settle for an ordinary flower?”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 47)
“I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds. I do not make any of my own clothing. I speak a language I did not invent or refine. I did not discover the mathematics I use. I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate. I am moved by music I did not create myself. When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive. I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with. I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.”
Steve Jobs
