What are you afraid of losing, when nothing in the world actually belongs to you.
A man on a thousand-mile walk has to forget his ultimate goal and say to himself every morning, 'Today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.'
In a world that’s changing so quickly, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.
It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.
To pray is to accept defeat
Never memorize something that you can look up.
We suffer more in imagination than in reality.
Don't talk about doing things, just do things.
The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn't have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I've ever met. It's gonna take awhile. It's normal to take awhile. You've just gotta fight your way through.
If all it took was information, we would all be millionaires with six packs.
To try and fail is at least to learn; to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have been.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.
Time is a created thing. To say 'I don't have time,' is like saying, 'I don't want to.'
That he not busy being born
Is busy dying
Your time is limited, don't waste it living someone else's life.
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.
If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. If they don't, they never were.
One can choose what to do, but not what to want.
You don’t go to heaven when you die. You go to heaven when you’re born.
Shallow happy is doing what you want now. Deep happy is doing what you want most.
No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.
Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise truth.
The pursuit of something is often what makes it seem less attainable. The most important things in life can only be achieved not by chasing, but by letting go.
Dreams are brief madness and madness a long dream.
Effective delegation requires giving up some control of exactly how the work is to be executed.
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.
The law of silence: Speak little. Say only what you must. Speak only when necessary. Your oratory should be deeds, not words.
The young man, who does not know the future, sees life as a kind of epic adventure, an Odyssey through strange seas and unknown islands, where he will test and prove his powers, and thereby discover his immortality.
The man of middle years, who has lived the future that he once dreamed, sees life as a tragedy; for he has learned that his power, however great, will not prevail against those forces of accident and nature to which he gives the names of gods, and has learned that he is mortal.
But the man of age, if he plays his assigned role properly, must see life as a comedy. For his triumphs and his failures merge, and one is no more the occasion for pride or shame than the other; and he is neither the hero who proves himself against those forces, nor the protagonist who is destroyed by them.
Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
When someone reported to him that he was being tried in the Senate, Paconius was uninterested; he merely set off for his daily exercise and bath. When he was informed that he had been condemned, he asked whether it was to banishment or death. “To banishment,” came the reply. He then asked whether his property at Aricia had also been confiscated, and when he was told that it hadn’t, he replied, “Let us go to Aricia then and dine.” Epictetus holds this up as a model of Stoic behavior: “This is what it means to have rehearsed the lessons one ought to rehearse, to have set desire and aversion free from every hindrance and made them proof against chance. I must die. If forthwith, I die; and if a little later, I will take lunch now, since the hour for lunch has come, and afterwards I will die at the appointed time.”
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul.
Distracted from distraction by distraction.
The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
It will be said that while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours’ work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world it is a condemnation of our civilisation; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency.
The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.
A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs — something, anything. Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.
Greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.
Because of that, if we were to be rational, it is the same thing as making us good, and that is the same thing as making us free.
Not free in the sense of political freedom, being a slave or free man, but free in the sense of being autonomous. Making our own decisions. Making laws for ourselves. Free in the sense of no longer being a slave of our passions. Being pushed about by our feelings. Being a toy that gets messed with by arbitrary things that are, really, beneath the human condition, that are mere emotions.
If we want to be fully human, we must be fully free, and that means fully rational, and that means fully good.
All men suffer, but not all men pity themselves.
These are not the droids you are looking for.
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