“Stop wandering about! You aren’t likely to read your own notebooks, or ancient histories, or the anthologies you’ve collected to enjoy in your old age. Get busy with life’s purpose, toss aside empty hopes, get active in your own rescue—if you care for yourself at all—and do it while you can.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, The Daily Stoic (Page 387)
“Gazing up at the Milky Way, I remember when all I wanted is what I have in this moment. Sitting on the kitchen floor of my old apartment, sicker than I’d ever felt, my heart fractured into ten thousand tiny pieces, I needed to believe that there was a truer, more expansive and fulfilling version of my life out there. I had no interest in existing as a martyr, forever defined by the worst things that had happened to me. I needed to believe that when your life has become a cage, you can loosen the bars and reclaim your freedom. I told myself again and again, until I believed my own words: It is possible for me to alter the course of my becoming.“
Suleika Jaoaud, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 324)
“It’s a kind of test, Mary, and it’s the only kind that amounts to anything. When something rotten like this happens, then you have your choice. You start to really be alive, or you start to die. That’s all.”
James Agee, A Death In The Family, via Sunbeams (Page 150)
“I decided to reimagine my survival as a creative act. If the chemo sores in my mouth made it too painful to talk, I would find new ways to communicate. As long as I was stuck in bed, my imagination would become the vessel that allowed me to travel beyond the confines of my room. If my body had grown so depleted that I now had only three functional hours each day, I would clarify my priorities and make the most of how I spent the time I had.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 109)
“You don’t have to believe there is a god directing the universe, you just need to stop believing that you’re that director. As soon as you can attune your spirit to that idea, the easier and happier your life will be, because you will have given up the most potent addiction of all: control.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 330)
“Today, we could hope that goodness comes our way—good news, good weather, good luck. Or we could find it ourselves, in ourselves. Goodness isn’t something that’s going to be delivered by mail. You have to dig it up inside your own soul. You find it within your own thoughts, and you make it with your own actions.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 317)
“For nothing outside my reasoned choice can hinder or harm it—my reasoned choice alone can do this to itself. If we would lean this way whenever we fail, and would blame only ourselves and remember that nothing but opinion is the cause of a troubled mind and uneasiness, then by God, I swear we would be making progress.”
Epictetus, Discourses, via The Daily Stoic (Page 246)
“It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I have not had time to remake the world.”
Will Durant, via Sunbeams (Page 120)
“Whatever happens today, let it find us prepared and active: ready for problems, ready for difficulties, ready for people to behave in disappointing or confusing ways, ready to accept and make it work for us. Let’s not wish we could turn back time or remake the universe according to our preference. Not when it would be far better and far easier to remake ourselves.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 184)
