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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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
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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
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