“In the same way that a vaccine exposes our body to a manageable amount of the virus or the disease, teaching it how to fight the illness, talking to ourselves (or our children) about what is going to happen in advance of it happening helps us deal with it. It removes the surprise, it removes the suddenness of it. The last thing you want to do is to face anything—a virus or a trip to the grocery store with a tired kid—defenseless. Especially when there are defenses available.”
Ryan Holiday
“Some people get addicted to chain-smoking their problems. They spend all day going from sorrow to sorrow. It doesn’t have to be that way. You can live each day going from joy to joy—like a sunflower that turns to face the sun as it moves across the sky. It’s not about having a problem-free life, but about focusing on the light. Sunflowers still have shadows, but they are always behind them.”
James Clear
“As irrigators lead water where they want, as archers make their arrows straight, as carpenters carve wood, the wise shape their minds.”
Buddha, via Think Like A Monk (Page 147)
“Look at causation stripped bare of its covers; look at the ulterior reference of any action. Consider, what is pain? What is pleasure? What is death? What is fame? Who is not himself the cause of his own unrest? Reflect how no one is hampered by any other; and that all is as thinking makes it so.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Page 117)
“I had always seen the world as my battlefield; I now understood that the true combat zone was my mind.”
Will Smith, Will (Page 394)
“Your mind will take on the character of your most frequent thoughts: souls are dyed by thoughts.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Page 41)
“You create the rich or arid landscape of your brain. If you constrict your thoughts to the same obsessions, to the tiny realm of your smartphone, that is the world the you create for yourself. What a waste of this magnificent instrument that you have inherited! But if you attempt to move in the opposite direction, you will notice the opposite dynamic—continual expansion, mental doors opening up in every direction, creative connections and new ideas flooding your brain. You will not want to stop exploring, because your exploration becomes a continuous source of pleasure for the restless energy of the human mind.”
Robert Greene, The Daily Laws (Page 448)
“You determine the quality of your mind by the nature of your daily thoughts. If they circle around the same obsessions and dramas, you create an arid and monotonous mental landscape, and this secretly makes you miserable. Instead, you must seek to radiate your mind outward, to unleash your imagination and intensify your experience of life.”
Robert Greene, The Daily Laws (Page 417)
“You cannot send away a bad thought when it appears in your mind, but you can create other thoughts which will weaken or destroy this bad thought. For example, I may imagine that your friend or neighbor has some drawback, and I may not be able to banish this thought, but when I concentrate on the thought that criticizing another person is bad because I am not perfect, and he has the same God within him as I have within me, then I cannot stop loving this person.”
Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 322)
“We, with our mindset, can make people respond to us in a friendly or unfriendly manner, depending on our anxiety or openness. We shape much of the reality that we perceive, dictated by our moods and emotions.”
Robert Greene, The Daily Laws (Page 362)