Truly humble

Humility engenders learning because it beats back the arrogance that puts blinders on. It leaves you open for truths to reveal themselves. You don’t stand in your own way. […] Do you know how you can tell when someone is truly humble? I believe there’s one simple test: Because they consistently observe and listen, the humble improve. They don’t assume, ‘I know the way.’

~ Wynton Marsalis

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Passion

Don’t try to find your passion. Instead master some skill, interest, or knowledge that others find valuable. It almost doesn’t matter what it is at the start. You don’t have to love it, you just have to be the best at it. Once you master it, you’ll be rewarded with new opportunities that will allow you to move away from tasks you dislike and toward those that you enjoy. If you continue to optimize your mastery, you’ll eventually arrive at your passion.

~ Kevin Kelly

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Courage

It takes courage to let go of what’s not working. Rather than focus on what you’re losing, hone in on what giving up goals affords you, like more time and energy. Remember no decision is permanent. You can continue to make adjustments until you find the balance of goals that works for you.

~ Melody Wilding

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In the end

Not just that every day more of our life is used up and less and less of it is left, but this too: If we live longer, can we be sure our mind will still be up to understanding the world—to the contemplation that aims at divine and human knowledge? If our mind starts to wander, we’ll still go on breathing, go on eating, imagining things, feeling urges and so on. But getting the most out of ourselves, calculating where our duty lies, analyzing what we hear and see, deciding whether it’s time to call it quits—all the things you need a healthy mind for… all those are gone.

So we need to hurry.

Not just because we move daily closer to death but also because our understanding—our grasp of the world—may be gone before we get there.

~ Marcus Aurelius

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Uneasy pleasures

Why are their pleasures uneasy? Because the motives upon which they are founded are not stable and they totter with the frivolity which gave them birth. … Laboriously they attain what they desire, anxiously they hold what they have attained, and in the meanwhile irrecoverable time is not taken into consideration.

~ Seneca

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Actions and perceptions

Operatics, combat and confusion. Sloth and servility. Every day they blot out those sacred principles of yours—which you day-dream thoughtlessly about, or just let slide. Your actions and perceptions need to aim: at accomplishing practical ends; at the exercise of thought; at maintaining a confidence founded on understanding. An unobtrusive confidence—hidden in plain sight.

When will you let yourself enjoy straightforwardness? Seriousness? Or understanding individual things—their nature and substance, their place in the world, their life span, their composition, who can possess them, whose they are to give and to receive?

~ Marcus Aurelius

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Dawning of moral progress

One of the signs of the dawning of moral progress is the gradual extinguishing of blame. We see the futility of finger-pointing. The more we examine our attitudes and work on ourselves, the less we are apt to be swept away by stormy emotional reactions in which we seek easy explanations for unbidden events.

~ Epictetus

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