He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason.
~ Cicero
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Passions →
In an instant →
No one has ever reached a point where the power fortune granted was greater than the risk. The sea is calm now, but do not trust it: The storm comes in an instant. Pleasure boats that were out all morning are sunk before the day is over.
~ Seneca
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Pragmatism →
Pragmatism is not so much realism as flexibility. There are a lot of ways to get from point A to point B. It doesn’t have to be a straight line. It’s just got to get you where you need to go. But so many of us spend so much time looking for the perfect solution that we pass up what’s right in front of us.
~ Ryan Holiday
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Hopefulness →
Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position—it is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.
~ Nick Cave
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Appetite →
No man’s body is as strong as his appetites.
~ Tillotson
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Reality →
In this modern age, very little remains that is real. Night has been banished, so have the cold, the wind and the stars. They have all been neutralized: The rhythm of life itself is obscured. Everything goes so fast and makes so much noise, and men hurry by without heeding the grass by the roadside, its colour, its smell and the way it shimmers when the wind caresses it. What a strange encounter then is that between man and the high places of his planet!
~ Gaston Rébuffat
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Persevere →
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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Benefit →
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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