“If I am transparent enough to myself, then I can become less afraid of those hidden selves that my transparency may reveal to others. If I reveal myself without worrying about how others will respond, then some will care, though others may not. But who can love me, if no one knows me? I must risk it, or live alone. It is enough that I must die alone. I am determined to let down, whatever the risks, if it means that I may have whatever is there for me.”
Sheldon Kopp, If You Meet The Buddha On The Road, Kill Him, via Sunbeams (Page 93)
“We are the living links in a life force that moves and plays through and around us, binding the deepest soils with the farthest stars.”
Alan Chadwick, via Sunbeams (Page 93)
“…we die to each other daily.
What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.
To pretend that they and we are the same
Is a useful and convenient social convention
which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember
That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.”
T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party, via Sunbeams (Page 74)
“Sometimes it seems to me that in this absurdly random life there is some inherent justice in the outcome of personal relationships. In the long run, we get no more than we have been willing to risk giving.”
Sheldon Kopp, via Sunbeams (Page 61)
“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the ‘universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Albert Einstein, via Sunbeams (Page 60)
“It is less painful, it turns out, to feel betrayed than to feel forgotten.”
Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life (Page 83)
“Above all, keep a close watch on this—that you are never so tied to your former acquaintances and friends that you are pulled down to their level. If you don’t you’ll be ruined… You must choose whether to be loved by these friends and remain the same person, or to become a better person at the cost of those friends… if you try to have it both ways you will neither make progress nor keep what you once had.”
Epictetus, Discourses, via The Daily Stoic (Page 79)
“It might make you feel good to dominate the conversation and make it all about you, but how do you think it is for everyone else? Do you think people are really enjoying the highlights of your high school football days? Is this really the time for another exaggerated tale of your sexual prowess? Try your best not to create this fantasy bubble—live in what’s real. Listen and connect with people, don’t perform for them.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 76)
“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”
Herman Melville, via Sunbeams (Page 51)
“Each phenomenon on earth is an allegory, and each allegory is an open gate through which the soul, if it is ready, can pass into the interior of the world where you and I and day and night are all one. In the course of his life, every human being comes upon that open gate, here or there along the way; everyone is sometimes assailed by the thought that everything visible is an allegory and that behind the allegory live spirit and eternal life. Few, to be sure, pass through the gate and give up the beautiful illusion for the surmised reality of what lies within.”
Hermann Hesse, Strange News From Another Star, via Sunbeams (Page 42)
“What I used to think of as happiness was merely distraction from the pain. The pain of disconnection, of separateness from you. All longing, all yearning, all thirst, flung on unworthy surrogates, false idols, unsated by unworthy objects, still pulling us unwillingly back together.”
Russell Brand, Recovery (Page 208)
Francois de La Rouchefoucauld Quote on Absence and How It’s The Ultimate Relationship Test
“Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.”
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Beyond the Quote (Day 411)
Without absence it’s hard to tell what’s a priority and what’s not. Because if there’s no absence, then there’s immersion and if we’re immersed in something, then that’s all we know—we have nothing to contrast it against. If we were only ever taught math, how might we know if we liked another subject better? If we only ever spent time with certain people, how could we know what it would be like to spend time with others? Contrast is what provides us with the opportunity to compare. Without it, we have only the option we have.
Read More »Francois de La Rouchefoucauld Quote on Absence and How It’s The Ultimate Relationship Test“When you start to drink, wank, eat, spend, obsess [excessively] you have lost your connection to the great power within you, the great power in others, the great power around all things. There is something in you speaking to you and you don’t understand it because you’ve never learned its language. So we try to palm it off with porn and consuming but it is your spirit calling and it craves connection. Spend time alone, write, pray, meditate. This is where we learn the language.”
Russell Brand, Recovery (Page 134)
