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Life

  • “A year from now what will you wish you had done today?”, Unknown
  • "You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with", Jim Rohn
  • “Risk by its very nature is mysterious. It is mystery lived, for it ventures into lands that are not controlled or charted.”, John Paul Lederach
  • “This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they are a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice. meet them at the door laughing and invite them in. Be grateful for whatever comes. Because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”, Rumi
  • “The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.”, Arthur C. Clarke
  • “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”, Albert Einstein
  • “The person who does not read is no better off than the person who can’t read.”, Mark Twain
  • “Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder”, E.B. White
  • “Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better”, Jack Kerouac
  • “Do. Or do not. There is no try.”, Yoda
  • “My value is courage, move along shame”, Brené Brown
  • “Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt”, John Muir
  • “Steel isn’t strong, boy, flesh is stronger!”, Thulsa Doom
  • “You know, it’s beautiful, and it’s hard, and you want to stop…”, Lynne Cox
  • “Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them - that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”, Lao Tzu
  • "To keep healthy and have a long life, eat just a little of everything with relish. Go to bed early, get up early, and then go out for a walk. We live each day with serenity and we enjoy the journey. To keep healthy and have a long life we get on well with all our friends. Spring. Summer. Fall. Winter. We happily enjoy all the seasons. The secret is not to get distracted by how old the fingers are. From the fingers to the head and back once again. If you keep moving with your fingers working, 100 years will come to you.", Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life
  • “Can’t trust the teeth in your mouth not to bite your tongue”
  • “Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them”, Albert Einstein
  • "True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so, wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.", Seneca
  • "You can change the world - one person at a time! Be the reason someone believes in the goodness of people. Let it begin with you."
  • "Let go of the old stories of yourself, in order to make way for the new ones", Tamara Levitt
  • "If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production of it, you just relax and remove it from your thinking", Richard Bach
  • "If you are acting like a sheep, do not blame the shepherd. You cannot herd lions. Wake up and roar and you are free."
  • "Beyond all things is the sea", Seneca
  • "I am not born for one corner; the whole world is my native land", Seneca
  • "To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance", Oscar Wilde
  • "What a liberation to realize that the 'voice in my head' is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees it" Eckhart Tolle
  • "You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength", Marcus Aurelius
  • "Closure happens right after you accept that letting go and moving on is more important than projecting a fantasy of how the relationship could have been."" Sylvester McNutt
  • "Seek not the good in external things; see it in yourselves", Epictetus
  • "Fall 7 times, rise 8", Japanese proverb
  • "No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted." Aesop
  • "Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing." Arundhati Roy
  • "At some point in life, the world’s beauty becomes enough", Toni Morrison
  • "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen", Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
  • "A ship ought not to be held by one anchor, nor life by a single hope", Epictetus
  • "There are more things, Lucilius, that frighten us than injure us, and we suffer more in imagination than in reality." Seneca
  • "The best things in life are waiting for you at the exit ramp of your comfort zone", Karen Salmansohn
  • "A wise person should not ignore life’s pleasures. A wise person can live with these pleasures, but always remain conscious of how easy it is to be enslaved by them"
  • "When you pay attention to boredom, it gets unbelievably interesting", Jon Kabat-zinn
  • "It’s good to do uncomfortable things. It’s weight training for life", Anne Lamott
  • "Cobwebs of the mind are cleared with the meditation broom", Swami Veda Bharati
  • "The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another" William James
  • "If the ocean can calm itself, so can you. We are both salt water mixed with air" Nayyirah Waheed
  • "You have the power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength" Marcus Aurelius
  • "Be softer with you. You are a breathing thing. A memory to someone. A home to a life." Nayyirah Waheed
  • "Poetry in when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words" Robert Frost
  • "Enlightenment is the quiet acceptance of what is." Wayne Dyer
  • "Cosmic humor, especially about your own predicament, is an important part of your journey", Ram Dass
  • "Peace. It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart", Unknown
  • "Beauty is not caused. It is." Emily Dickinson
  • "Meditation is the journey from sound to silence, from movement to stillness, from limited identity to unlimited space", Sri Ravi Shankar
  • "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.", Unknown
  • "Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final." Rainer Maria Rilke
  • "The earth is not my home, I’m just passing by" Tom Waits
  • "The bravest thing we can do is try...", Unknown
  • "No mud, no lotus", Unknown
  • "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves and wiser people so full of doubt.", Bertrand Russell
  • "We are born in one day. We did in one day. We can change in one day. And we can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in just one day", Gayle Forman
  • "If it can be solved, then there’s no need to worry, and if it can’t be solved then worry is of no use", Dalai Lama
  • "One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning", James Russell Lowell
  • "Friendship is a sheltering tree", Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • "Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime", The Nix
  • "Experience will give you the power and confidence to be you."
  • "Love is an experience of infinity."
  • "Piece of mind comes piece by piece"
  • "Give love, get love"
  • "An attitude of gratitude brings opportunties"
  • "Live light, travel light, spread the light, be the light"
  • "Happiness is actually an art of living, which is in us"
  • "Your greatest strength is love"
  • "Be kind to others but always be compassionate to yourself"
  • "Compassion has no limit. Kindness has no enemy"
  • "Our creative consciousness is not limited"
  • "Love is to live for somebody, love is not to live with somebody"
  • "The voice of your soul is breath"
  • "Everlasting impact with compassion and kindness is called love"
  • "You will always live happy if you live with heart"
  • "An attitude of gratitude brings opportunties"
  • "May this day bring you peace, tranquility and harmony"
  • "Live righteously and love everyone; you will build up around you an aura of light and love"
  • "When the dawn of simplicity comes in life, complications leave"
  • "Letting go doesn’t always equate to losing or missing out. You’re growing, you’re shedding, you’re becoming" Alex Elle
  • "Your strength is your own knowledge"
  • "You must have self respect then you can respect somebody"
  • "This is a great and precious gift; but if the poet remains content with his gift, if he persists in worshipping the beauty in nature without going on to make himself capable, through selflessness, of apprehending Beauty as it is in the divine Ground, then he is only an idolater." — Aldous Huxley
  • On polarization: "It's a global phenomenon which is new to the world due to social media. Algorithms and AI suggests content that we want to see not what is truth. This leads to polarization to extreme sides."
  • “Make shame your friend...there’s no way to get good at something without being bad at it first”, St Vincent
  • "A genius is the man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him is losing his mind", Napoleon
  • "The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes", Sherlock Holmes
  • "We are our memories, and the recalling of them, and so they should never be erased", Gravemind
  • "If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change", Wayne Dyer
  • "A planet is the cradle of mind, but one cannot live in a cradle forever", Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (rocket scientist)
  • "Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble", John Lewis
  • "If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down", Toni Morrison
  • "The beginning is always today", Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
  • "To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is to have succeeded." Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • "There is nothing like you, was nothing like you, and there shall be nothing like you"
  • "We control our reasoned choice and all acts that depend on that moral will. What’s not under our control are the body and any of its parts, our possessions, parents, siblings, children, or country—anything with which we might associate." Epictetus
  • "The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them", Turkish proverb
  • "Pass through this brief patch of time in harmony with nature, and come to your final resting place gracefully, just as a ripened olive might drop, praising the earth that nourished it and grateful to the tree that gave it growth.", Marcus Aurelius
  • "You only come to this movie once and if you don’t get something rewarding out of every minute you’re sitting there then you’re blowing your ticket."
  • "Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not a truth.", Not Marcus Aurelius, apparently
  • "We're afraid of being still, so we seek out strife and action as a distraction."
  • "Dare mighty things", Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
  • "When life gets hard, we work harder", Kevin Bluer
  • "If you’re depressed, you’re living in the past. If you’re anxious, you’re living in the future. If you are at peace, you’re living in the present.", Lao Tzu
  • "What’s remembered lives"
  • "What if you do achieve everything but find that nobody is impressed?"
  • "If it follows that you’ll find whatever it is you happen to be looking for…what should you be looking for?"
  • "One person with a will can accomplish the impossible"
  • "...it is a privilege to grow old"
  • "we should all be better listeners and support each other in both big and small ways whenever possible, you never know how one small act of kindness can forever change someone’s life for the better"
  • "To strive, to seek, to find, to not to yield"
  • "The paths of our lives is separate, but the essence is together"
  • "It has been so long since I had any reason to be happy I don’t quite know how to handle it"
  • "Ironically it’s these really hard times and the mistakes we make in life that can yield the greatest benefit...it gives us a tremendous opportunity for personal growth"
  • "We don't put people out, we take them in"
  • "It takes more than just intelligence to act intelligently", Dostoevsky
  • "Figuring out ways of letting going of anger is the key to being happy", Soft White Underbelly
  • "All in, all the time"
  • "If you don’t schedule a break, your body will take one for you. And it probably won’t be at a convenient time."
  • "No one saves us but ourselves / No one can and no one may.", Buddha

"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish", Carl Sagan

  • "Wisdom, self-control, justice, courage", Four core stoic virtues
  • "Yet you keep traveling and meeting more amazing people but eventually you miss them all...part of the price of a rich life tinged with a bit of sadness and loneliness", Pico Iyer on the curse of the traveler 

"As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark a false trail, the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction.", Excerpt from Wendell Berry poem

  • "Everyone wants everything to go perfectly from the word go, but the real key is not getting lost in the minutiae, just start, just begin and the rest will fall into place", Kai Greene
  • "Your discipline must be stronger than your feelings. Your determination must be stronger than your distractions..."
  • "How nice it would be to die swimming towards the sun" Le Corbusier
  • "During hardship be sure to lean in to your mental and physical health"
  • "The Queen’s funeral, which many saw as a colossal moment of national collective mourning, looked instead like a longing for togetherness that has very few other outlets", Nesrine Malik
  • "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
  • "As human beings we all breathe the atoms that made up our ancestors and flow into the same earth when we die."
  • "Blue...the color of where you are not", Bonnie Hsu, Why We Swim
  • "I realized there wasn’t anything left in drinking for me", Justin Kan
  • "The reality of where you are is always more important than the ideal of where you imagine you should be"
  • "A founder CEO friend of mine stopped going to the gym because he couldn’t justify the 2 hours out of his day. The reality is everyone treats you differently when you’re a tank. You’re going to get way more ROI out of the rest of your day if you’re a unit. 2 hours is a bargain."
  • "I've fallen in love with making myself stronger"
  • "Growing up with parents who taught you how to stay optimistic and believe in yourself, is underrated."
  • "Be careful who you praise and admire. Be careful who you look down upon and wish to avoid becoming."
  • "Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room. I am I, and you are you. Whatever we were to each other, that we still are. Call me by my old familiar name, speak to me in the easy way which you always used. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together. Pray, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was, let it be spoken without effect, without the trace of a shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was; there is unbroken continuity. Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well.", Henry Scott Holland
  • "When you go to war with yourself you find peace", David Goggins
  • "The secret to having it all is knowing that you already do"
  • "Onward through the fog"
  • "The days are long but the years are short"
  • “People do not decide their futures. They decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.”
  • "Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost...", Charlie Chaplin
  • "We can't control everything that happens to us, but we can control how we treat ourselves. Allowing ourselves to feel happy, no matter what our life looks like, is the key to real happiness." (quote)
  • "My self care is not just about me"
  • "Man sacrifices his health to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health." Dalai Lama
  • "nothing is a big deal in this moment", The Fonzie Effect
  • "It is being honest about my pain that makes me invincible", Nayyirah Waheed
  • When worrying about something, shift to care about someone else...this is how meaning emerges from struggle
  • Pay attention to our stories OR a simple story-free sensation in the moment...which do I / you want?
  • "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take", Wayne Gretzky
  • "The best way to predict the future is to create it", Abraham Lincoln
  • "Don’t leave empty handed"
  • "Intimacy matters, if you need some intervention, get it", Esther Perel
  • "Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.", Buddha
  • "People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." - Carl Jung
  • "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.", Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
  • "It’s strange," I told him, "after how tough it all was, I'm grateful for it. Putting myself back together made me realise how strong I could be." https://open.substack.com/pub/thenewfatherhood/p/the-cracks-in-everything-c2a?r=1iglp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
  • "Happiness is about being surrounded by the young"
  • On giving up alcohol: Life is ever so slightly more boring in that you don’t have the highs. BUT you don’t really have lows any more (or at least not to the same degree). You’re more resilient, you’re able to get stuff done, you’re generally happy,
  • "People either survive in the jungle or exist in the zoo", The Gentleman
  • "Everything in moderation, including moderation." - Oscar Wilde
  • "Not without danger", The Gentleman
  • "There are three sides to every story, yours, mine, and the truth", Robert Evans
  • “The grass is greener where you water it”