Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.
~ Joan Didion
slip:4a970.
Quotes
A long long time ago I began collecting inspirational quotes and aphorisms which became my collection of quotes.
Wise consumption
Wise consumption is much more complicated than wise production. What five people will produce, one person can very easily consume, and the question for each individual and for every nation is not how are we to produce, but how our products are to be consumed.
~ John Ruskin
slip:4a969.
Goodness
Pay bad people with your goodness; Fight their hatred with your kindness. Even if you do not achieve victory over other people, you will conquer yourself.
~ Henri Amiel
slip:4a968.
Misfortunes
If you fear woes and misfortunes, then you are already unhappy. Those who fear misfortunes usually deserve them.
~ Chinese proverb
slip:4a967.
Virtue stands firm
This is the divine law of life: That only virtue stands firm. All the rest is nothing.
~ Pythagoras
slip:4a966.
Innocence
Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.
~ Joan Didion from, On Self-Respect
slip:4a965.
Mortality
The essential power that confronting your mortality will give you—I call it the Sublime. Because it also opens up this idea of how amazing the world is that we live in, and how much we take for granted because we think that we’re going to live forever. It’s an incredibly important concept to me and it’s also very personal in the sense that I came this close to dying myself. I compare it to standing at the shore of some vast ocean. The fear of that dark ocean makes you turn away and retreat. I want you to get into your little boat and I want you to go into that ocean and explore it.
~ Robert Greene
slip:4a964.
The pit of despair
When—despite your best efforts—you feel like you’re losing at the game of life, remember: Even the best of the best sometimes feel this way. When I’m in the pit of despair, I recall what iconic writer Kurt Vonnegut said about his process: “When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” Don’t overestimate the world and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think. And you are not alone.
~ Tim Ferriss
slip:4a963.
Self-doubt
You know what the best thing about being an entrepreneur is? That you never have to experience self-doubt, the way people with normal day jobs do.
~ Hugh MacLeod
Ha. I was just kidding. Actually, as an entrepreneur, you have self-doubt coming out of your pores like cold sweat. And that’s on a good day.
slip:4a962.
Desires
It is easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it.
~ Benjamin Franklin
slip:4a961.
Have we become wiser?
We live in the age of philosophy, science, and intellect. Huge libraries are open for everyone. Everywhere we have schools, colleges, and universities which give us the wisdom of the people from many previous millennia. And what then? Have we become wiser for all this? Do we better understand our life, or the meaning of our existence? Do we know what is good for our life?
~ Jean Jacques Rousseau
slip:4a960.
Forgetting
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.
~ Joan Didion
slip:4a959.
The moment
The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.
~ Neil Gaiman
slip:4a958.
Get to work
Stop searching for magic tricks. Roll up your sleeves and get to work. The fool will find this idea depressing. The wise person will find this liberating. So it goes.
~ Hugh Macleod
slip:5a957.
Our relationship with death
We now live in a world where [our relationship with detah] is the complete opposite. We have to repress the very thought of it. We can’t see it anywhere. It’s put into hopitals where it’s sanitized, where it happens behind closed doors. Nobody ever talks about it. Nobody tells you this is probably the most important life skill that you could have—to know how to deal with that fear of mortality. Nobody teaches that. Your parents don’t talk about it. Your girlfriend or boyfriend—they don’t talk about it. Nobody. It’s a dirty little secret. But it’s the only reality we have. We’re all going to die.
~ Robert Greene
slip:4a956.
Human existence
Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.
~ Bertrand Russel
slip:4a955.
Priorities
Lack of time is lack of priorities. If I’m “busy,” it is because I’ve made choices that put me in that position, so I’ve forbidden myself to reply to, “how are you?” with “busy.” I have no right to complain. Instead, if I’m too busy, it’s a cue to reexamine my systems and rules.
~ Tim Ferriss
slip:4a954.
Utterance is magic
This is why utterance is magic. Words do have power. Names have power. Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.
~ Ursula K. Le Guin
slip:4a953.
Fair winds
Somehow these less-than-ideal conditions raised his game, spurred him on to greatness. There’s a definite lesson here. Fair winds do not a great captain make. We dream of finding our own greatness one day, but we want it to happen when the sun is shining.
~ Hugh Macleod
slip:4a952.
Three dots
Let me be clear that no part of me idealizes the bygone agony of waiting three weeks for a letter from your lover to cross the Atlantic—a letter that might never arrive from a lover who might be dead by the time it does arrive. But let me also be clear that, in another century or two, if humanity is wise enough to survive and reconsider its compulsions, posterity will look back on us gobsmacked that we put ourselves through the agony of the three pulsating dots.
~ Maria Popova
slip:4a951.