Presence, not pursuit.
A degree on your wall means you’re educated as much as shoes on your feet mean you’re walking. It’s a start, but hardly sufficient. […] Just as you can walk plenty well without shoes, you don’t need to step into a classroom to understand the basic, fundamental reality of nature and of our proper role in it. Begin with awareness and reflection. Not just once, but every single second of every single day.
~ Ryan Holiday
Elsewhere, this is 4a1143. — slipbox
When someone reveals something that they’re struggling with, or something painful that happened to them, I often find myself saying, “I’m so sorry, thank you for sharing that with me.” Let’s acknowledge that you’ve just said something, that there’s nothing I can say that’s gonna lift that pain. By saying that, you’re focusing the conversation on what they’ve disclosed to you. You can also talk about how you’re talking about it. You can say, “I don’t know what to say right now. But I just want to tell you, I’m really sorry to know that.”
~ Anna Sale
Elsewhere, this is 4a1108. — slipbox
To create a meaningful work of art or to make a discovery or invention requires great discipline, self-control, and emotional stability. It requires mastering the forms of your field. […] When you look at the exceptionally creative work of Masters, you must not ignore the years of practice, the endless routines, the hours of doubt, and the tenacious overcoming of obstacles these people endured.
~ Robert Greene
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What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities, of having a patient, but restless mind, of sacrificing one’s ease or vanity, of uniting a love of detail to foresight, and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully.
~ Victor Cherbuliez
Elsewhere, this is 4a1141. — slipbox
The moral? That there is no greater homage we could pay Proust than to end up passing the same verdict on him as he passed on Ruskin, namely, that for all its qualities, his work must eventually also prove silly, maniacal, constraining, false and ridiculous to those who spend too long on it.
“To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: It does not constitute it.”
Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside.
~ Alain de Botton
Elsewhere, this is 4a1107. — slipbox
What makes the difference between an outstandingly creative person and a less creative one is not any special power, but greater knowledge (in the form of practiced expertise) and the motivation to acquire and use it. This motivation endures for long periods, perhaps shaping and inspiring a whole lifetime.
~ Margaret A. Boden
Elsewhere, this is 4a1140. — slipbox
We only really know what is new, what suddenly introduces to our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, that for which habit has not yet substituted its pale facsimiles.
~ Marcel Proust
Elsewhere, this is 4a1106. — slipbox
I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.
~ Jim Carrey
Elsewhere, this is 4a1139. — slipbox
Read less, study less, but think more. Learn, both from your teachers and from the books which you read, only those things which you really need and which you really want to know.
~ Leo Tolstoy
Elsewhere, this is 4a1105. — slipbox
For every time you regret that you did not say something, you will regret a hundred times that you did not keep your silence.
~ Leo Tolstoy
Elsewhere, this is 4a1137. — slipbox