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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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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Future

The present moment was once the unimaginable future.

~ Stewart Brand

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First judgements

[R]eject the first judgements and the objections that spring out of them because those objections are so often rooted in fear. […] This is radically different from how we’ve been taught to act. Be realistic, we’re told. Listen to feedback. Play well with others. Compromise. Well, what if the “other” party is wrong? What if conventional wisdom is too conservative? It’s this all-too-common impulse to complain, defer, and then give up that holds us back.

~ Ryan Holiday

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Desperation

People are getting a little desperate. They might not show their best elements to you. You must never lower yourself to being a person you don’t like. There is no better time than now to have a moral and civic backbone. To have a moral and civic true north. This is a tremendous opportunity for you, a young person, to be heroic.

~ Henry Rollins

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Self-conceit

Peole who do not know how to laugh are always pompous and self-conceited.

~ William Makepeace Thackeray

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Petty hazards

Anybody can rise to meet a crisis and face a crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh—I really think that requires spirit.

~ Jean Webster

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Begin. Begin!

Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin!

~ Donald Barthelme

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Language

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.

~ Richard Chenevix Trench

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