Reality

In this modern age, very little remains that is real. Night has been banished, so have the cold, the wind and the stars. They have all been neutralized: The rhythm of life itself is obscured. Everything goes so fast and makes so much noise, and men hurry by without heeding the grass by the roadside, its colour, its smell and the way it shimmers when the wind caresses it. What a strange encounter then is that between man and the high places of his planet!

~ Gaston Rébuffat

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Persevere

Persevere in what you have begun; hurry as much as you can, so that you will have more time to enjoy a mind that is settled and made flawless. To be sure, you will have enjoyment even as you make it so; But there is quite another pleasure to be gained from the contemplation of an intellect that is spotlessly pure and right.

~ Seneca

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Benefit

The one way to guarantee we don’t benefit from failure—to ensure it is a bad things—is to not learn from it. To continue to try the same things over and over (which is the definition of insanity for a reason). People fail in small ways all the time. But they don’t learn. They don’t listen. They don’t see the problems that failure exposes. It doesn’t make them better.

~ Ryan Holiday

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The ideal life

The race convinced me of what I had for some time suspected. For me, the ideal life is one that combines body and spirit, one that joins the intensely physical and the intensely intellectual. I would wither away without the exercise of the flesh.

~ Barry Strauss

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Passion

Passion makes us feel, but never see clearly.

~ Bulwer-Lytton

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Ritual

Ritual is not the re-enactment of a past event. It is the re-enactment of meaning.

~ David Whyte

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Tranquility

[Do not disquiet] yourself by running about from place to place. Thrashing around in that way indicates a mind in poor health. In my view, the first sign of a settled mind is that it can stay in one place and spend time with itself.

~ Seneca

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Persistence

Consider this mindset:

never in a hurry
never worried
never desperate
never stopping short

As Epictetus once summarized his entire philosophy: Persist and resist. Persist in your efforts. Resist giving in to distraction, discouragement, or disorder.

~ Ryan Holiday

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The job

A man’s job is to make the world a better place to live in, so far as he is able—always remembering the results will be infinitesimal—and to attend to his own soul.

~ Leroy Percy

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Problems

The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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