Presence, not pursuit.
Ought you not first to have acquired something by the use of reason, and then to have made that secure? But you are studying to be able to prove things in argument. Prove what, though? You are studying so as not to be shaken by fallacious arguments. Shaken from what? Show me first what you are watching over, what you are measuring, or what you are weighing; and then, accordingly, show me your balance.
~ Epictetus
Elsewhere, this is 4a240. — slipbox
There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
~ David Eagleman
Elsewhere, this is 4a602. — slipbox
As if all was safe and well with you, you have dwelt upon the final area of study, which has to do with unchangeability, so that you can make yourself unchangeable—in what? Your cowardice, means-spiritedness, admiration for the rich, your failure to achieve what you desire, and your lack of success in avoiding what you want to avoid. These are the things that you have been laboring to secure.
~ Epictetus
Elsewhere, this is 4a245. — slipbox
Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
Elsewhere, this is 4a599. — slipbox
There are too many of us and we are all too far apart.
~ Kurt Vonnegut
Elsewhere, this is 4a598. — slipbox
What, then, is the proper training for this? Firstly, the highest and principal form of training, and one that stands, so to speak, right at the entrance way to the enterprise, is, that when you become attached to something, let it not be as though it were to something that cannot be taken away, but rather, as though it were to something like an earthenware pot or crystal goblet, so that if it happens to be broken, you may remember, what kind of thing it was, and not be distressed.
~ Epictetus
Elsewhere, this is 4a255. — slipbox
The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.
~ Marcel Proust
Elsewhere, this is 4a596. — slipbox
When you have acquired a contempt for things that are external and lie outside the sphere of choice, and have come to regard none of them as your own, but only this as your own, to judge and think aright, and exercise your impulses, desires and aversions aright, what further room is there after that for flattery, what room for an abject mind?
~ Epictetus
Elsewhere, this is 4a260. — slipbox