Skip to content

    “Want to drive yourself crazy? Try to fix everyone around you. Try to make them so perfect that they can’t annoy you in any way whatsoever. Make them so morally perfect and righteous that they will always make the right decision and will go out of their way to help you.  Or, if you prefer to keep things simple, rigidly examine your own shortcomings and biases. Correct your own faults first.  Trying to escape your own faults will take a lifetime.” ~ Matt Karamazov, High Existence

      “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.” ~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

        “When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can’t make them change if they don’t want to, just like when they do want to, you can’t stop them.” ~ Andy Warhol, via Nitch

          “You must avoid the common mistake of making judgments based on your initial impressions of people.  Such impressions can sometimes tell you something, but more often they are misleading.  There are several reasons for this.  In our initial encounter you tend to be nervous, less open, and more inward.  You are not really paying attention.  Furthermore, people have trained themselves to appear a certain way; they have a persona they use in public that acts like a second skin to protect them.  Unless you are incredibly perceptive, you will tend to mistake the mask for the reality.” ~ Robert Greene, Mastery

            “People will say all kinds of things about their motives and intentions; they are used to dressing things up with words.  Their actions, however, say much more about their character, about what is going on underneath the surface.  If they present a harmless front but have acted aggressively on several occasions, give the knowledge of that aggression much greater weight than the surface they present.  In a similar vein, you should take special note of how people respond to stressful situations—often the mask they wear in public falls off in the heat of the moment.” ~ Robert Greene, Mastery

              “You must allow everyone the right to exist in accordance with the character he has, whatever it turns out to be: and all you should strive to do is to make use of this character in such a way as its kind of nature permits, rather than to hope for any alteration in it, or to condemn it offhand for what it is.  This is the true sense of the maxim—Live and let live… To become indignant at [people’s] conduct is as foolish as to be angry with a stone because it rolls into your path.  And with many people the wisest thing you can do, is to resolve to make use of those whom you cannot alter.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, via Mastery

                “Knowing what you want out of life, and who you want in it, means nothing if you can’t also say no to everything but those people and things.  Until you cultivate the ability to say no to the things that fill your life but not your soul, you’ll never have the space to bring into it the things you desperately want to say yes to.” ~ Jonathan Fields, How To Live A Good Life