Philosophy Quotes curated by Brianna Wiest | Quote Catalog

Brianna Wiest

A semblance of the whole.

Brianna Wiest's quotes about philosophy

Aristotle approves of food, drink and sex (all in moderation – he’s big on moderation); he believes leisure is more important than work; that we all have innate talents and that we don’t peak until we’re 49. What’s not to like?

— Lisa Allardice, How Aristotle is the perfect happiness guru

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You could perhaps say ‘happiness’ but ‘happiness’ is misleading, for it suggests continuous chirpiness and joy, whereas ‘fulfillment’ seems compatible with a lot of pain and suffering, which every decent life must by necessity have.

— Alain de Botton, The School of Life: An Interview With Alain de Botton

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The central fallacy in modern life is that accomplishments can produce deep satisfaction. That's false.

— David Brooks, The Road to Character

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The average college GPA for a self-made millionaire is somewhere in the low B range. But at some crucial point in their lives, somebody told them they were too stupid to do something and they set out to prove the bastards wrong.

— David Brooks, The Road to Character

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Love is the strongest kind of army because it generates no resistance.

— David Brooks, The Road to Character

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Self-respect is not the same as self-confidence or self-esteem. Self-respect is not based on IQ or any of the mental or physical gifts that help get you into a competitive college. It is not comparative. It is not earned by being better than other people at something. It is earned by being better than you used to be, by being dependable in times of testing, straight in times of temptation. It emerges in one who is morally dependable. Self-respect is produced by inner triumphs, not external ones.

— David Brooks, The Road to Character

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The sensitive person understands that each person's ordeal is unique and should not be compared to anyone else's. Next, they do the practical things: making lunch, dusting the room, washing the towels. They don't try to minimize what is going on. They don't attempt to reassure with false, saccharine sentiments. They don't say that the pain is all for the best. They don't search for silver linings. They do what wise souls do in the presence of tragedy and trauma. They practice a passive activism. They don't bustle about trying to solve something that cannot be solved. The sensitive person grants the sufferer the dignity of her own process. She lets the sufferer define the meaning of what is going on. She just sits simply through the nights of pain and darkness, being practical, human, simple, and direct.

— David Brooks, The Road to Character

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Success leads to the greatest failure, which is pride. Failure leads to the greatest success, which is humility and learning.

— David Brooks, The Road to Character

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As Felitti spoke to the 183 people in the program, he found 55 percent had been sexually abused. One woman said she put on weight after she was raped because 'overweight is overlooked, and that’s the way I need to be.' It turned out many of these women had been making themselves obese for an unconscious reason: to protect themselves from the attention of men, who they believed would hurt them. Felitti suddenly realized: What we had perceived as the problem ― major obesity ― was in fact, very frequently, the solution to problems that the rest of us knew nothing about.

— Johann Hari, Opinion | The Real Causes Of Depression Have Been Discovered, And They're Not What You Think

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No person would give up even an inch of their estate, and the slightest dispute with a neighbor can mean hell to pay; yet we easily let others encroach on our lives — worse, we often pave the way for those who will take it over. No person hands out their money to passers-by, but to how many do each of us hand out our lives! We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers.

— Seneca, Letters from a Stoic (Penguin Classics)

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Terence J. Tollaksen wrote that his purpose became clearer once he began to recognize the decision trap: an amazingly consistent phenomena whereby ‘big’ decisions turn out to have much less impact on a life as a whole than the myriad of small seemingly insignificant ones.

— David Brooks, Opinion | The Small, Happy Life

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I expected most contributors would follow the commencement-speech clichés of our high-achieving culture: dream big; set ambitious goals; try to change the world. In fact, a surprising number of people found their purpose by going the other way, by pursuing the small, happy life.

— David Brooks, Opinion | The Small, Happy Life

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One thing: you have to walk, and create the way by your walking; you will not find a ready-made path.

— Osho, The Book of Secrets: 112 Meditations to Discover the Mystery Within

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Sadness gives depth. Happiness gives height. Sadness gives roots. Happiness gives branches. Happiness is like a tree going into the sky, and sadness is like the roots going down into the womb of the earth. Both are needed, and the higher a tree goes, the deeper it goes, simultaneously. The bigger the tree, the bigger will be its roots. In fact, it is always in proportion. That's its balance.

— Osho, Everyday Osho: 365 Daily Meditations for the Here and Now

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So be authentic when you feel angry toward your lover or your beloved. Be authentic while you are in anger, and then with no repression, when the moment of love will come, when the mind will move to the other extreme, you will have a spontaneous flow. So with mind, take fighting as part of it. It is the very dynamism of the mind to work in polar opposites. So be authentic in your anger, be authentic in your fight, then you will be authentic in your life also.

— Osho, The Book of Secrets: 112 Meditations to Discover the Mystery Within

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The more negatively I reacted to my negative feelings, the greater the likelihood I would be starting to set the stage for a neurotic pattern. Imagine, for example, if I hated the feelings and the event so much that I hated myself for causing them. Or if I hated the girls with thoughts like, 'All girls manipulate you,' or 'People love causing others pain.' Both of these lines of thought are understandable negative reactions to the negative feelings. However, they are deeply problematic because they trap me in a negative view of the world, and if I had invested strongly in either line thinking, I would have likely been trapped into a neurotic cycle.

— Gregg Henriques, Getting Beyond Negativity

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The first of these insights is that when cues are available, people tend to conform to expected behaviors and implicit rules. This is why we’re less likely to order a stiff drink at dinner when the rest of the table ordered water. But donations are often kept private. Fortunately, good design could promote social norms of giving. One way is to present meaningful benchmarks to help people see how their actions measure up against others’. One study used donation boxes at an art gallery to demonstrate the power of norming. When the transparent boxes were seeded mostly with coins, follow-on patrons gave similar small donations. But when large bills lined the box, patrons responded accordingly by raising their own donation amounts. If charities offered people this type of visibility on their peers’ giving, perhaps more of the right cues could reach prospective donors.

— Omar Parbhoo, I Think, Therefore I Am—Generous?

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What, then, is the real relationship between art and trade? Agonistic? Complementary? The question, suggesting something like a creative sanctum shimmering a few meters above the room in which you punch a clock or schedule a meeting, supposes that aesthetic experience is categorically different from everyday experience, and that muse-fueled invention floats apart from earthier forms of productivity.

— Katy Waldman, Does Having a Day Job Mean Making Better Art?

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Once upon a time, artists had jobs. And not 'advising the Library of Congress on its newest Verdi acquisition' jobs, but job jobs, the kind you hear about in stump speeches. Think of T.S. Eliot, conjuring 'The Waste Land' (1922) by night and overseeing foreign accounts at Lloyds Bank during the day, or Wallace Stevens, scribbling lines of poetry on his two-mile walk to work, then handing them over to his secretary to transcribe at the insurance agency where he supervised real estate claims. The avant-garde composer Philip Glass shocked at least one music lover when he materialized, smock-clad and brandishing plumber’s tools, in a home with a malfunctioning appliance. 'While working,' Glass recounted to The Guardian in 2001, “I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him that I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.

— Katy Waldman, Does Having a Day Job Mean Making Better Art?

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That meeting is where I first learned magical thinking. Through sheer force of will, these women intended to break their bodies like wild horses, starve them into submission, and, in so doing, attain the dazzling lives of thin women. They stayed hungry, forever famished, but were never quite thin enough to realize the potential and promise that would deliver them to the world promised in weight loss commercials and daytime talk shows, morning news and women’s magazines, promised by friends and mothers. They were not devout enough, and stayed soft with their original sin.

— Your Fat Friend, The magical thinking of weight loss. – Your Fat Friend – Medium

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I hope that in the future they invent a small golden light that follows you everywhere and when something is about to end, it shines brightly so you know it's about to end.

And if you're never going to see someone again, it'll shine brightly and both of you can be polite and say, 'It was nice to have you in my life while I did, good luck with everything that happens after now.'

And maybe if you're never going to eat at the same restaurant again, it'll shine and you can order everything off the menu you've never tried. Maybe, if someone's about to buy your car, the light will shine and you can take it for one last spin. Maybe, if you're with a group of friends who'll never be together again, all your lights will shine at the same time and you'll know, and then you can hold each other and whisper, 'This was so good. Oh my God, this was so good.'

— Iain Thomas, The Light That Shines When Things End

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Negative emotions don’t just cause negative thoughts, they cause excessively negative thoughts, that reflect a distorted picture of reality. Anxiety causes us to overestimate how dangerous things are, depression makes our situation seem hopeless, and anger makes small slights seem like major attacks. In other words, negative emotions cause us to think in distorted ways that make these same emotions grow.

— Spencer Greenberg, Break Your Downward Emotional Spiral

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Now let me say this for the people in the back: please stop playing the victim to circumstances you’ve created.

— Shireen Aljundi, Why Playing The Victim Card Is Ruining Your Life

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People would occasionally come up to me and say: 'I want what you have. Can you give it to me, or show me how to get it?' And I would say: 'You have it already. You just can't feel it because your mind is making too much noise.' That answer later grew into the book that you are holding in your hands.

— Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

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Resist nothing.

— Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

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Do you know what your thoughts did last week? They became the things and events of this week. The things you thought would be difficult became difficult; easy became easy; boring became boring; and fun became fun. Where you thought there might be surprises, you were surprised. And where you thought there might be land mines, there were land mines. Bravo! You can add this week to the list of your most creative accomplishments.

— Mike Dooley, via www.tut.com

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To cope with the conflict between hope and reality, our culture should teach us good integration skills, prompting us to accept with a little more grace what is imperfect in ourselves – and then, by extension, in others. We should be gently reminded that no one we can love will ever satisfy us completely – but that this is never a reason to hate them either. We should move away from the naivety and cruelty of splitting people into the camps of the awful and the wondrous, to the mature wisdom of integrating them into the large collective of the ‘good enough’.

— Alain de Botton, On the Tendency to Love and Hate Excessively

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It’s a huge psychological achievement to accept other humans in their bewildering mixture of good and bad, capacity to assist us and to frustrate us, kindness and meanness – and to see that, far more than we’re inclined to imagine in our furious or ecstatic moments, most people belong in that slightly sobering, slightly hopeful grey area that goes by the term ‘good enough.'

— Alain de Botton, On the Tendency to Love and Hate Excessively

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If you want to make any permanent change in your life, willpower won’t get you there. Whether you want to get healthier, stop using social media so much, improve your relationships, be happier, write a book, or start a business — willpower won’t help you with any of these things. Personal progress and achieving success are best approached like you’re overcoming addiction. Because, quite literally, that’s what you’re doing. As human-beings, we all have addictions. I openly admit being addicted to social media, my current belief system, my comfort zone, and my excuses. I’m also addicted to a lot of other behaviors that contradict my goals. We are all addicted. And the cognitive dissonance is numbing. If you’re serious about the changes you want to make, willpower won’t be enough. Quite the opposite. Willpower is what’s holding you back.

— Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn’t Work. Here’s How to Actually Change Your Life.

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I am not asking how many items are on your to-do list, nor asking how many items are in your inbox. I want to know how your heart is doing, at this very moment. Tell me. Tell me your heart is joyous, tell me your heart is aching, tell me your heart is sad, tell me your heart craves a human touch. Examine your own heart, explore your soul, and then tell me something about your heart and your soul.

Tell me you remember you are still a human being, not just a human doing. Tell me you’re more than just a machine, checking off items from your to-do list. Have that conversation, that glance, that touch. Be a healing conversation, one filled with grace and presence.

— Omid Safi, The Disease of Being Busy

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When you move slower than the world, and breathe more deeply than the world, you awaken a consciousness beyond any world.

— Matt Kahn, Whatever Arises, Love That: A Love Revolution That Begins with You

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It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

— Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

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Passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.

— Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

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Interests are not discovered through introspection. Instead, interests are triggered by interactions with the outside world. The process of interest discovery can be messy, serendipitous, and inefficient. This is because you can't really predict with certainty what will capture your attention and what won't. Without experimenting, you can't figure out which interests will stick, and which won't.

— Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

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How can we reverse the negativity that surrounds being receptive — to love, to someone else’s dreams? What are we supposed to do with this space? Stare down into it? Put flowers in it? Shout out to the less receptive among us that there is nothing wrong with saying what one wants, including love? I don’t know. Just don’t call me until you’re ready to receive, and I’m ready to give. One sees flowers growing around Montgomery Clift’s mouth at the end of that black-and-white masterpiece, A Place in the Sun (1951). The flowers grow in the earth of his receptivity — his openness to the scene, the atmosphere. In all aspects of his work Clift was, to my mind and eye, the greatest film actor this country has ever produced, largely because he jettisoned acting out for acting in. He embodied receptivity.

— Hilton Als, Rookie Love

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It’s odd, but wouldn’t you say that in our universe of worked-out bodies and worked-out minds, that to be receptive is looked upon as 'weak,' a passive vessel for someone else’s love and dreams? So, instead of embracing the generosity inherent in being able to accept love, the receptors among us punish themselves by adopting stereotypical “needy” behavior, warping their instincts to look “active,” the better to satisfy an audience’s view of what it means to be open.

— Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice

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I never change, I simply become more myself.

— Joyce Carol Oates, Solstice by Joyce Carol Oates (1986-10-01)

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If you are willing to look at another person’s behavior toward you as a reflection of the state of their relationship with themselves rather than a statement about your value as a person, then you will, over a period of time cease to react at all.

— Yogi Bhajan, I Am a Woman: Creative, Sacred & Invincible--Essential Kriyas For Women In The Aquarian Age

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I read. That's my form of travel.

— Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit

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I think that most of us feel like something is missing from our lives. And I wondered then if Knight's journey was to seek it. But life isn't about searching endlessly to find what's missing. It's about learning to live with the missing parts.

— Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit

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All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.

— Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

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The real me isn't the person I describe, no the real me is the me revealed by my actions.

— Malcom Gladwell, Blink

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I like to say that meditating is the mind’s way of looking in the mirror and cleaning itself up. Except the mind won’t do this on its own volition. Just sit in silence with your eyes closed. Focus on the breath. Give your mind a chance to correct itself. Watch your life slowly transform into something tranquil and endlessly interesting.

— Charlie Ambler, How To Meditate All Day Long

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Instead of meditating to become better at your job, rid yourself of addiction, or solve some sort of problem in your life, meditate to meditate. The act of meditating every day will carry over into everything else you do. People find themselves magically quitting smoking, drinking less, fighting less and feeling less anxious after a few weeks of regular meditation. It’s not a miracle; it’s just you giving your mind some time to reflect.

— Charlie Ambler, How To Meditate All Day Long

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Meditation allows us to rearrange the entire mental fabric of living. This makes perfect sense, since it’s been proven to change the brain chemistry of regular practitioners. The mind is able to recalibrate itself and focus on what really matters: present scenery and circumstances.

— Charlie Ambler, How To Meditate All Day Long

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The scale of circumstance is not ‘happiness’ and ‘unhappiness’. There are a lot of ‘happy’ people in this world and a lot of ‘unhappy’ people, but this doesn’t matter. Chasing happiness rearranges your life so that you prevent yourself from taking the risks and enduring the suffering that’s likely to provide you with any sort of lasting awareness or wisdom. And that wisdom will always be offset by more suffering, so it’s important to learn to navigate the world in a way that isn’t just centered around happiness and well-being.

— Charlie Ambler, via medium.com

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Many people have a narcotic attitude towards suffering. It terrifies them and makes them uncomfortable and so instead of building a tool set for overcoming it, they aim to stifle it. The sheer popularity of entertainment, junk food, porn, video games and all these other modern distractions is testament to this. People have been led to believe that life is about satisfying simply impulses of instant gratification. They might not even be conscious of it; these distractions are provided to us as entertainment but they all serve as narcotics. The rise of tech and the rise of opioid abuse parallel one another. No surprises there.

— Charlie Ambler, You're Supposed To Suffer

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It’s a weird specific type of human arrogance to think that people can offset the great universal balance of positive and negative. It’s like trying to split an atom; we all know what happens when you do that. There are thousands of books out there trying to convince people that the secret to their happiness is nothing more than a bit of positive thinking. This is very much a materialistic reduction of the concept of happiness. Similarly, it teaches people to obsess over happiness— not such wonderful advice. You know what the least likely way to find satisfaction is? Chasing satisfaction.

— Charlie Ambler and Charlie Ambler, You’re Supposed to Suffer

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The truth is that the key to relaxation and finding inner peace doesn’t rely much on work, culture, or consumption. This should be a huge relief, since regardless of where you live, what you believe, or who you are, your stress is probably the result of one of the below factors... The world does stuff to you, but your life is determined by how you react to this stuff. Most of the power is in your hands. Don’t try to convince yourself that you’re helpless, or that things can’t change. Change is the essence of everything. Embrace it and catalyze it if you are feeling helpless or dissatisfied.

— Charlie Ambler and Charlie Ambler, How to Relax Now

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Getting the fuck over it does not mean you ignore your feelings. They are not the same thing. Getting the fuck over it means I see you, emotion that could have the power to devastate me and paralyze me for the day, or week, or year. And I am choosing to put my energy elsewhere. It does not mean you suppress your feelings, it means you acknowledge them, but the compulsion to choose to breathe life and attention into them no longer controls you. You are liberated. You are free. The tonic for being emotionally broken is building mental strength.

— Brianna Wiest, Get The F*#k Over It

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A wise man rules his passions, a fool obeys them.

— Publius Syrus, The Moral Sayings Of Publius Syrus: A Roman Slave (1855)

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Pleasures will never make you whole.

— Eric Greitens, Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life

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How do you know the difference between acknowledging pain and wallowing in it? There's no precise test. But if talking about or "explaining" or "understanding" your pain has become an excuse you use to avoid doing what you need to do, then you are probably wallowing.

— Eric Greitens, Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life

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Standing at sea level, an ax in your hand feels like a feather. At twelve thousand feet, hours from the summit, an extra pound in your pack feels like an anvil. In the same way, words have value.

— Eric Greitens, Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life

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A masterful warrior carries everything she needs and no more, just as a masterful painter uses all of the paint that she needs and no more, and a master chef uses all of the ingredients that she needs and no more. In the same way, a masterful philosopher will use all of the words that she needs and no more.

— Eric Greitens, Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life

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Culture was originally a word for the tilling and tending of the land. Later, people made an analogy and suggested that you could cultivate yourself. So culture also came to mean the things that you could see, listen to, read, learn, try and practice in order to make yourself better and to live a fuller life.

— Eric Greitens, Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life

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Yet even after being so close to misery in so many different places, on some level I still thought of most people's struggles as man against the world, rather than man against the self. But when you're in bed and not tired and it's bright outside and you can't seem to get your feet on the floor, you start to see that a lot of our most important battles are the ones we fight for self-mastery.

— Eric Greitens, Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life

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When we're struggling, we don't need a book in our hands. We need the right words in our minds. When things are tough, a mantra does more good than a manifesto.

— Eric Greitens, Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life

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Falling in love for us meant falling into talk. We talked about our memories, broken bones, broken hearts and one broken marriage. We talked about our mothers, one Jewish and one Italian, constantly cooking and feeding. We talked about our fathers, neither of whom cooked or fed.

We talked about friends, come and gone. We talked about our careers, climbing the ladder of success, falling off the ladder, leaning in and leaning out.

We talked about our dreams: of traveling, of marriage, of how many children we would like and what we would name them. With those subjects addressed, we turned to smaller details and anecdotes, the stories about getting drunk, getting lost, crashing the car, stealing a candy bar and falling down a flight of subway stairs before a job interview.

Finally, we talked about the nonstories, the quirky facts and facets of personality: our favorite movies, what we liked to eat, what we wouldn’t eat. He hated Kalamata olives. He could do without cucumbers. I hated capers and marshmallows (and the end of ‘Ghostbusters’). He talked about rivers and rocks. I quoted Frank O’Hara and Mayakovsky. We compared 5K running times.

There was never enough time and so much to discuss. We talked about the colors of leaves, the shapes of clouds and why the word ‘warmth’ has a hidden ‘p.’

We talked about sex.

We talked about our wedding.

We talked about our new house.

We talked about furnishing it.

We talked about pregnancy.

We talked about the child.

Then the second.

Seven years into it, our marriage was different. After the machinations of getting the children to sleep, we would sit side by side in bed with computers on our laps, surfing the internet. We were not talking, not sleeping, so close and yet so far apart. This dynamic — of being physically together but emotionally disengaged — had also bled into the mundane of the everyday, with too much silence and space between us on the couch and with us cooking on opposite sides of the kitchen island.

— Molly Pascal, How the ‘Dining Dead’ Got Talking Again

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Maybe the problem is not that we don’t have enough time but that we waste the time we have. Seneca famously thought this. (‘It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.’) Most of us seem unable to refrain from ‘wasting’ time. It is the rare person indeed who can be maximally efficient and productive. For the rest of us — that is, for almost all of us — Seneca’s advice about not wasting time seems true but useless.

If we devoted our entire lives to one great painting or one beautiful melody, even if that work was a masterpiece, we might feel absurd to have spent our entire lives on it. A life so spent is bound to have been narrow, confining and oddly obsessive. That doesn’t seem to be a reasonable way to spend one’s entire life. It seems out of scale. But if life were much longer, we might have enough time to write many books, paint many paintings, compose many melodies and, over a couple of hundred years or so, get really good at it. We might even feel fulfilled, accomplished and decidedly non-absurd. Maybe not, but we would have more of a chance than we do now, in our fleeting, ludicrous, minute lifespan.

— Rivka Weinberg, Why Life Is Absurd

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Today I will lie in bed and drown in salt water.

Tomorrow I will remember myself, drink milk to strengthen my bones, sharpen my nails like claws because if I’m supposed to be dangerous might as well play the part, ¿no?

If I will be named dangerous, then I will wear it like armor to fight for my right to exist and be human on this planet and maybe when the fighting is done, I’ll be able to sleep without drowning.

— Andy Frias, Queer Latinas Share Love, Rage, Sadness and Strength For Our Family Lost in Orlando

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Venus, the planet of love and harmony has been in close vicinity of the sun, since April 26th and will continue to be until 15th July, paving the way for the love revolution when Jupiter enters Libra on September 9th until October 10th, 2017.

We can see similarities now to 1969 when Jupiter was in Libra. It was the time of the love revolution and peace movement following the Uranus conjunct Pluto years of exposing corrupt governments and corporations with revolutionary changes happening on a personal and global level.

Resulting in the love and peace revolution.

— Vivienne Micallef-Browne, Get Ready For A Major Shift, Full Moon in Sagittarius 20th June - Expanded Consciousness

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Something is happening to our species, and especially over the last 70 years. The years since 1945 have seen many horrors: the partition of India, China’s Great Leap Forward, the Vietnam War, the Biafran crisis, the Khmer Rouge and the Rwandan genocide, wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, mass slaughters, civilizational dictatorships, widespread famines and the grueling civil conflicts that have become watchwords for evil in our time. Today our screens overflow with chaos and hate, and today our screens follow us everywhere.

Yet this has also been the most prosperous time in human history by far. And by a long way the time with the greatest increase in democracy around the world. It has also been the most peaceful era in recorded human history. What Hegel called the slaughter-bench of history is becoming less bloody.

Humanity does learn, painfully and often only after thousands or even millions have died.
That thesis about ‘the most peaceful era in history’ is naturally the hardest to believe, yet it’s true. As Joshua Goldstein puts it in ‘Winning the War on War,’ ‘We have avoided nuclear wars, left behind world war, nearly extinguished interstate war, and reduced civil wars to fewer countries with fewer casualties.

— LEIF WENAR, Is Humanity Getting Better?

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What we do now echoes in eternity.

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Dover Thrift Editions)

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There are stars you haven't seen and loves you haven't loved. There's light you haven't felt and sunrises yet to dawn. There are dreams you haven't dreamt and days you haven't lived and nights you won't forget and flowers yet to grow. There is more to you that you have yet to know.

— Gaby Comprés, Gaby Comprés: Poems

How To Think The Art of Awareness Psychology Philosophy

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Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.

— Alan Watts, Become What You Are

How To Think The Art of Awareness Psychology Philosophy

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We think of forest fires as these devastating events that we need to stop, but they are actually vital to ecological health of an area. There are plants that require the heat of a wildfire for their seeds to burst open and plant themselves in the earth. There are others that are meant to be flammable, so that fires quells competition. As it turns out, forests are made to have a periodic cleansing by fire. Your heart is made this way, also.

— Chrissy Stockton, 100 Reasons Losing Him Is Not A Loss

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Being passive is not the same as being peaceful. If you aren't doing what you know, in your heart, you want to do, you are NOT going with the flow. You are going against the flow. Your reactions, emotions, desires, and talents are all part of the flow of life. Ignoring them is passive resistance. Let yourself go.

— Vironika Tugaleva, The Love Mindset

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At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potential in my neurons cascade into certain arrangements, patterns, thoughts; they flow down my spine, branch into my arms, my fingers, until muscles twitch and thought is translated into motion; mechanical levers are pressed; electrons are rearranged; marks are made on paper.

At another time, in another place, light strikes the marks, reflects into a pair of high-precision optical instruments sculpted by nature after billions of years of random mutations; upside-down images are formed against two screens made up of millions of light-sensitive cells, which translate light into electrical pulses that go up the optic nerves, cross the chiasm, down the optic tracts, and into the visual cortex, where the pulses are reassembled into letters, punctuation marks, words, sentences, vehicles, tenors, thoughts.

The entire system seems fragile, preposterous, science fictional.

— Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

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Your call to power is to slow down and reflect within. Gather the peace within yourself before you go out and act among the world. The feel good feeling that lasts is only achieved when you yourself know peace. Nothing is more powerful. This is why you have the highs and lows, the mood swings, the transcendent ecstasy followed by the crash. It is because you have yet to develop a foundation of peace for yourself that acts as an unmovable anchor in your life. Establish this peace in your life and you will experience a whole new reality of the world that flows with you in every way possible, rather than against you.

— Alaric Hutchinson, Living Peace

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The names we use to describe personality traits - such as extrovert, high achiever, or paranoid - refer to the specific patterns people have used to structure their attention. At the same party, the extrovert will seek out and enjoy interactions with others, the high achiever will look for useful business contacts, and the paranoid will be on guard for signs of danger he must avoid. Attention can be invested in innumerable ways, ways that can make life either rich or miserable.

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow

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Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery.

— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

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You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole – like the world, or the person you loved.

— Stewart O'Nan, The Odds: A Love Story

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What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.

— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

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To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.

— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

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Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

— Alan Watts, The Way of Zen

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Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

— Alan Watts, The Way of Zen

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You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.

— Alan Watts, The Way of Zen

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To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.

— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

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The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

— Alan Watts, The Culture Of Counter-Culture

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This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.

— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

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We fail so easily to see the difference between fear of the unknown and respect for the unknown, thinking that those who do not hasten in with bright lights and knives are deterred by a holy and superstitious fear. Respect for the unknown is the attitude of those who, instead of raping nature, woo her until she gives herself. But what she gives, even then, is not the cold clarity of the surface but the warm inwardness of the body - a mysteriousness which is not merely a negation, a blank absence of knowledge, but that positive substance which we call wonderful.

— Alan Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

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The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions. And even a cursory glance at the history of the biological sciences during the last quarter of a century is sufficient to justify the assertion, that the most potent instrument for the extension of the realm of natural knowledge which has come into men's hands, since the publication of Newton's ‘Principia’, is Darwin's ‘Origin of Species.

— Thomas Henry Huxley, Man's Place In Nature

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The fear of an unknown never resolves, because the unknown expands infinitely outward, leaving you to cling pitifully to any small shelter of the known: a cracker has twelve calories; the skin, when cut, bleeds.

— Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

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A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

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Would you like to know your future? If your answer is yes, think again. Not knowing is the greatest life motivator. So enjoy, endure, survive each moment as it comes to you in its proper sequence, a surprise.

— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

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We are perishing for lack of wonder, not for lack of wonders.

— G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

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You will face your greatest opposition when you are closest to your biggest miracle.

— Shannon Alder, 300 Questions To Ask Your Parents Before It's Too Late

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If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

— Leo Tolstoy, Essays, Letters and Miscellanies

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The Anxiety Trick is this: You experience Discomfort, and get fooled into treating it like Danger.

What do we do when we're in danger? We only have three things: Fight, Flight, and Freeze. If it looks weaker than me, I'll fight it. If it looks stronger than me, but slower, I'll run away. And if it looks stronger and faster than me, I'll freeze and hope it doesn't see so good. That's all we have for danger.

A person with Panic Disorder gets tricked into holding her breath and fleeing the store (highway, theater, or other locale), rather than shifting to Belly Breathing. and staying there until the feelings pass.

A person with Generalized Anxiety Disorder gets tricked into trying to stop the unwanted "what if?" thoughts, rather than accepting them and taking care of present business as thoughts come and go.

A person with Social Phobia gets tricked into avoiding the party, or hiding in the corner if he attends, rather than say hello to a stranger and see what happens.

A person with OCD gets tricked into repeatedly washing his hands, or returning home to check the stove, rather than accepting the intrusive thoughts of contamination and fire and returning his energies to the present activities at hand.

A person with a dog phobia gets tricked into avoiding the feelings by avoiding all dogs, rather than spending time with a dog until the feelings pass.

— David Carbonell, Panic Attacks Help: Overcome Panic & Anxiety Attacks!

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To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

— Yann Martel, Life of Pi

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Perhaps our dreams are there to be broken, and our plans are there to crumble, and our tomorrows are there to dissolve into todays, and perhaps all of this is all a giant invitation to wake up from the dream of separation, to awaken from the mirage of control, and embrace whole-heartedly what is present. Perhaps it is all a call to compassion, to a deep embrace of this universe in all its bliss and pain and bitter-sweet glory. Perhaps we were never really in control of our lives, and perhaps we are constantly invited to remember this, since we constantly forget it. Perhaps suffering is not the enemy at all, and at its core, there is a first-hand, real-time lesson we must all learn, if we are to be truly human, and truly divine. Perhaps breakdown always contains breakthrough. Perhaps suffering is simply a right of passage, not a test or a punishment, nor a signpost to something in the future or past, but a direct pointer to the mystery of existence itself, here and now. Perhaps life cannot go 'wrong' at all.

— Jeff Foster, Life Without a Centre

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A leaf does not resist the breeze. A goose does not resist the urge to fly down south. Is this not happiness? Is this not freedom? To access this incredible state, we need only one thing: Trust. Trust that, when you are not holding yourself together so tightly, you will not fall apart. Trust that it is more important to fulfill your authentic desires than listen to your fears. Trust that your intuition is leading you somewhere. Trust that the flow of life contains you, is bigger than you, and will take care of you - if you let it.

— Vironika Tugaleva, The Love Mindset

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Once you realize that life and love are not things you can possess but forces that emanate through us and through all creation, then you can begin to appreciate the miracle you are a part of. You can release the burden and appreciate what you have had, have now and will have. Only trying to hold on to what you do not have causes pain. Letting go permits you to experience the incredible joy that comes to you at each and every moment.

— James Rozoff, Seven Stones

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When you hold onto a script that doesn't serve you, you leave no space to write a new one that does.

— Jennifer Ho-Dougatz, Unknown

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Take a shower. Wash away every trace of yesterday. Of smells. Of weary skin. Get dressed. Make coffee, windows open, the sun shining through. Hold the cup with two hands and notice that you feel the feeling of warmth.   You still feel warmth. Now sit down and get to work. Keep your mind sharp, head on, eyes on the page and if small thoughts of worries fight their ways into your consciousness: throw them off like fires in the night and keep your eyes on the track. Nothing but the task in front of you.

Get off your chair in the middle of the day. Put on your shoes and take a long walk on open streets around people. Notice how they’re all walking, in a hurry, or slowly. Smiling, laughing, or eyes straight forward, hurried to get to wherever they’re going. And notice how you’re just one of them. Not more, not less. Find comfort in the way you’re just one in the crowd. Your worries: no more, no less.

Go back home. Take the long way just to not pass the liquor store. Don’t buy the cigarettes. Go straight home. Take off your shoes. Wash your hands. Your face. Notice the silence. Notice your heart. It’s still beating. Still fighting. Now get back to work.  Work with your mind sharp and eyes focused and if any thoughts of worries or hate or sadness creep their ways around, shake them off like a runner in the night for you own your mind, and you need to tame it. Focus. Keep it sharp on track, nothing but the task in front of you.

Work until your eyes are tired and head is heavy, and keep working even after that.

Then take a shower, wash off the day. Drink a glass of water. Make the room dark. Lie down and close your eyes.  Notice the silence. Notice your heart. Still beating. Still fighting. You made it, after all. You made it, another day. And you can make it one more.  You’re doing just fine.  You’re doing fine.

I’m doing just fine.

— Charlotte Eriksson, You're Doing Just Fine

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To ‘let go’ sometimes makes us feel like losers because it means giving up what truly we felt we had a right to. But true strength lies in resisting the urge to hold onto things and people that bring us down.

— Chinonye J. Chidolue, Peregrine Reads

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It is not the actions of others which trouble us (for those actions are controlled by their governing part), but rather it is our own judgments. Therefore remove those judgments and resolve to let go of your anger, and it will already be gone. How do you let go? By realizing that such actions are not shameful to you.

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

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Do you know what pain is, Cammie? It’s the body’s physical response to imminent harm. It is the mind’s way of telling us to move our hand off the stove or let go of the broken glass.

— Ally Carter, Out of Sight, Out of Time

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Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You've got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it. It's like boats. You keep your motor on so you can steer with the current. And when you hear the sound of the waterfall coming nearer and nearer, tidy up the boat, put on your best tie and hat, and smoke a cigar right up till the moment you go over. That's a triumph.

— Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

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