No amount of travel or reading or clever sages can tell you what you want to know. Instead, it is you who must find the answer in your actions, in living the good life – by embodying the self-evident principles of justice, self-control, courage, freedom, and abstaining from evil.
We’ve all experienced that – don’t mess up. Don’t mess up. Don’t forget, we say to ourselves – and what happens? We do exactly what we were trying not to do.
The whole isn’t certain, only the instances are.
Wisdom does not immediately produce stillness or clarity. Quite the contrary. It might even make things less clear – make them darker before the dawn.
You are schooled in the art of managing your perceptions and impressions. Like Rockefeller, you’re cool under pressure, immune to insults and abuse. You see opportunity in the darkest of places.
Think progress, not perfection. Under this kind of force, obstacles break apart. They have no choice. Since you’re going around them or making them irrelevant, there is nothing for them to resist.
Miyamoto Musashi won countless fights against feared opponents, even multiple opponents, in which he was swordless. In The Book of Five Rings, he notes the difference between observing and perceiving. The perceiving eye is weak, he wrote; the observing eye is strong. Musashi understood that the observing eye sees simply what is there. The perceiving eye sees more than what is there. The.
When student is ready, the teacher appears.
Whatever you face, whatever you’re doing will require first and foremost, that you don’t defeat yourself. That you don’t make it harder by overthinking, by needless doubts, or by second-guessing.
To steady our nerves To ignore what disturbs or limits others To place things in perspective To revert to the present moment To focus on what can be controlled.
She wasn’t driven by passion, but by reason.
No one achieves excellence or enlightenment without a desire to get better, without a tendency to explore potential areas of improvement.
If you invest the time and mental energy, you’ll not only find what’s interesting, you’ll find the truth. You’ll find what other people have missed.
If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way. – EMILE ZOLA.
To revert to the present moment To focus on what can be controlled.
In shutting up – even if only for a short period – we can finally hear what the world has been trying to tell us. Or what we’ve been trying to tell ourselves.
First, you ought to live your own life in such a way that it doesn’t negatively impose on others. Second, you have to be open-minded and accepting enough to let others do the same.
We can’t be afraid of silence, as it has much to teach us. Seek it. The tricking of the hands of your watch is telling you how time is passing away, never to return. Listen to it.
We would never let another person jerk us around the way we let our impulses do. It’s time we start seeing it that way – that we’re not puppets that can be made to dance this way or that way just because we feel like it. We should be the ones in control, not our emotions, because we are independent, self-sufficient people.
Robert Caro has written that “power doesn’t corrupt, it reveals.