Persevere in what you have begun; hurry as much as you can, so that you will have more time to enjoy a mind that is settled and made flawless. To be sure, you will have enjoyment even as you make it so; But there is quite another pleasure to be gained from the contemplation of an intellect that is spotlessly pure and right.
~ Seneca
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The one way to guarantee we don’t benefit from failure—to ensure it is a bad things—is to not learn from it. To continue to try the same things over and over (which is the definition of insanity for a reason). People fail in small ways all the time. But they don’t learn. They don’t listen. They don’t see the problems that failure exposes. It doesn’t make them better.
~ Ryan Holiday
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The race convinced me of what I had for some time suspected. For me, the ideal life is one that combines body and spirit, one that joins the intensely physical and the intensely intellectual. I would wither away without the exercise of the flesh.
~ Barry Strauss
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Passion makes us feel, but never see clearly.
~ Bulwer-Lytton
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Ritual is not the re-enactment of a past event. It is the re-enactment of meaning.
~ David Whyte
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[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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Consider this mindset:
never in a hurry
never worried
never desperate
never stopping shortAs 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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A man’s job is to make the world a better place to live in, so far as he is able—always remembering the results will be infinitesimal—and to attend to his own soul.
~ Leroy Percy
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The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
slip:4a1542.
The present moment was once the unimaginable future.
~ Stewart Brand
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[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
slip:4a1538.
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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Peole who do not know how to laugh are always pompous and self-conceited.
~ William Makepeace Thackeray
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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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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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What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first step to something better.
~ Wendell Phillips
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Defiance and acceptance come together well in the following principle: There is always a countermove, always an escape or a way through, so there is no reason to get worked up. No one said it would be easy and, of course, the stakes are high, but the path is there for those ready to take it. This is what we’ve got to do. And we know that it’s going to be tough, maybe even scary.
~ Ryan Holiday
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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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The truth is the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theater.
~ David Foster Wallace
slip:4a1531.
Writing is essentially donkey work, manual labor of the mind. What makes it bearable are those moments (which sometimes can last for weeks, months) when the book takes over, takes on a life of its own, goes off in unexpected directions.
~ John Gregory Dunne
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