The enemy is a very good teacher. – the Dalai Lama.
You imagined we had entered unknown country, my friend, when we voyaged across the sea to Amazonia. Yet that was nothing beside the frontier I cross each evening with this woman who is my equal. Each dawn new continents are sighted; each night one alights on shores where no man’s sole has trod.” He.
The professional is prepared at a deeper level. He is prepared, each day, to confront his own self-sabotage.
Now it’s 1967. Nasser and the Arabs are saying to themselves: The Jews have beaten us in Round One and Round Two, but we will wipe them out for good in Round Three.
Do not tell me death is real. It is not. I have sustained my heart for ages with the love my brother passed on to me, dead as he was.
A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman.
The professional loves it so much he dedicates his life to it. He commits full-time. That’s what I mean when I say turning pro. Resistance hates it when we turn pro.
Remember, they hate us as no other nation, for we are to them that which they fear beyond all: women unmastered by men.
The essence of professionalism is the focus upon the work and its demands, while we are doing it, to the exclusion of all else. The ancient Spartans schooled themselves to regard the enemy, any enemy, as nameless and faceless. In other words, they believed that if they did their work, no force on earth could stand against them.
Our very existence makes them abominate us, for it calls their own wives and daughters to aspire to freedom.
Depression and anxiety may be real. But they can also be Resistance. When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul’s call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers. We’re doing exactly what TV commercials and pop materialist culture have been brainwashing us to do from birth. Instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification and hard work, we simply consume a product. Many pedestrians have been maimed or killed at the intersection of Resistance and Commerce.
I can procrastinate thinking about my procrastination problem. I can procrastinate dealing with my problem of procrastinating thinking about my procrastination problem.
Resistance, his all-encompassing term for what Freud called the Death Wish – that destructive force inside human nature that rises whenever we consider a tough, long-term course of action that might do for us or others something that’s actually good.
Resistance is the enemy within.
Last of terror’s stages, Selene had tutored Europa and me, is busyness.
The power to take charge was in my hands; all I had to do was believe it.
Do it or don’t do it.
Our team has zero; has he got Close Air Support, drones, anything?
Our greatest fear is fear of success.
When we experience panic, it means that we’re about to cross a threshold. We’re poised on the doorstep of a higher plane.