“Borrowed wisdom breaks under pressure because you haven’t earned it. You’re trusting someone else’s compression without knowing what created it. Earned wisdom, on the other hand, holds up because it’s rooted in your actual experience. You know when it works, why it works, when to ignore it and when to bend it because you created the compression.”
Shane Parrish
“The Stoics remind us that everything has its compensation…if we choose to see it, if we choose to welcome it. The challenges we face as parents become our greatest teachers and guides. You’ll have moments at the dialysis center that years from now, you wouldn’t trade for anything. You’ll develop patience and resilience that you could have otherwise never imagined—and they will too. You’ll learn how to advocate for yourself and for them. You’ll come face to face with this thing called acceptance. You will understand what it means to love, to really love unconditionally.”
Ryan Holiday
“There are two ways to live a longer life: 1) Biologically. Extend the timeline between your birth and your death. 2) Psychologically. Fit more lives into whatever time you are given. Make each decade rich with experiences and perhaps you can live a handful of lives before you are done.”
James Clear
“You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”
T. H. White, via Ikigai (Page 97)
“In my body and in my soul I realized that I greatly needed sin, I needed lust, vanity, the striving for goods, and I needed the most shameful despair to learn how to give up resistance, to learn how to love the world, to stop comparing the world with any world that I wish for, that I imagine, with any perfection that I think up; I learned how to let the world be as it is, and to love it and to belong to it gladly.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 125)
“Wisdom cannot be communicated. Wisdom that a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish. Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. We can find it, we can live it, we can be carried by it, we can work wonders with it, but we cannot utter it or teach it.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 124)
“What father, what teacher could shield [his son] from living his own life, soiling himself with life, burdening himself with guilt, drinking the better drink himself, finding his path himself? Do you really believe, dear friend, that anyone at all is spared this path? Perhaps your little son because you love him, because you would like to spare him pain and sorrow and disillusion? But even if you died for him ten times over, you could not take away even the tiniest bit of his destiny.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 106)
“That was why he had had to go out into the world, losing himself in pleasure and power, in women and money, had had to become a merchant, a dicer, a drinker, a grasper, until the priest and the samana inside him were dead. That was why he had had to keep enduring those ugly years, enduring the disgust, the emptiness, the meaninglessness of a bleak and lost life, to the end, to bitter despair, until Siddhartha the sensualist, Siddhartha the grasper could die. He had died; a new Siddhartha had awoken from sleep. He too would grow old, he too would have to die someday—Siddhartha was ephemeral, every formation was ephemeral. But today he was young, was a child, the new Siddhartha, and was full of joy.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 88)
“‘It is good,’ he thought, ‘to taste everything that one needs to know. As I child I learned that wealth and worldly pleasure are not good. I knew it for a long time, but I experienced it only now. And now I know it, know it not only with my memory, but also with my eyes, with my heart, with my stomach. Good for me that I know it!'”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 87)