“In the struggle against injustice, it’s easy to let bitterness and hatred harden your heart. As Marcus Aurelius wrote: ‘What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.’ When we close ourselves off to love and hope, we naturally experience less love and hope. The Bible reminds us that ‘whoever hardens their heart falls into trouble.’ And James Baldwin, that ‘hatred…has never failed to destroy the men who hated.’ Hatred corrodes. It takes you south, backward, down, down to depths. Love, on the other hand, protects, trusts, hopes, preserves. Love does not fail. It takes you north, it leads you forward. It always wins. Which way are you going? Is your heart growing or shrinking? Is your love and compassion and connection for other people, your hope for a better future, growing or shrinking?”
Ryan Holiday
“She would never be ashamed for her own nature. She would see the doctor. She would make an appointment and continue to do and take and try whatever they advised. She wouldn’t run from her pain any more. She wouldn’t poison herself with the pressures of imagined perfection. She would see her own hurt, recognise it, and not imagine there was a life of unquestionable positivity and happiness she was being deprived from. She would accept the darkness of life in a way she never had, not as failure but as part of a totality, as something that threw other things into relief, into growth, into being. The ash in the soil.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 285)
“Don’t try to fight with the darkness. There is no way, because the darkness does not exist—how can you fight with it? Just light a candle, and the darkness is gone. So forget about the darkness, forget about the fear. Forget about all those negative things that ordinarily haunt the human mind. Just burn a small candle of enthusiasm.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 119)
“At some point we will all confront a dark moment in life. If not the passing of a loved one, then something else that crushes your spirit and leaves you wondering about your future. In that dark moment, reach deep inside yourself and be your very best.”
William A. McRaven, Make Your Bed (Page 81) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Part X is the judgmental part of you, the antisocial part of you. It’s an invisible… force that wants to keep you from changing or growing. It wants to block your evolution. It wants to block your potential. Part X is the voice of impossibility. Whatever it is you think you need to do, it’s gonna tell you that’s impossible.”
Phil Stutz, Stutz
“For it’s always that way with the sacred value of life. We forget it as long as it belongs to us, and give it as little attention during the unconcerned hours of our life as we do the stars in the light of day. Darkness must fall before we are aware of the majesty of the stars above our heads.”
Stefan Zweig, via The Daily Laws (Page 423)
“When life gets scary and difficult, we tend to look for solutions in places where it is easy or at least familiar to do so, and not in the dark, uncomfortable places where real solutions might lie.”
Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life
“as it works for the individual, it also works for the collective of humanity—we can’t heal what is ignored, nor can we live happily and freely if we continue running away from our own darkness.”
Yung Pueblo, Inward (Page 121)
