“The first lesson — great men are always the kindest. The second lesson was that they nearly always lead the simplest lives.”— Stefan Zweig, amazon.com
“Life's barely long enough to get good at one thing. If that long. So be careful what you get good at.”— Kurt Vonnegut, amazon.com
“We have come to believe that only those who have passion find fulfillment and success professionally. It’s as if passion is life’s magic pixie dust. We want success for our children and believe that only passion can lead them there. We hold on to this myth despite considerable evidence that millions…”— Lisa Heffernan, parenting.blogs.nytimes.com
“From a young age, resilient children tended to meet the world on their own terms. They were autonomous and independent, would seek out new experiences, and had a positive social orientation. Though not especially gifted, these children used whatever skills they had effectively. Perhaps most importan…”— Maria Konnikova, newyorker.com
“Emotion is where learning begins, or, as is often the case, where it ends. Put simply, it is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don’t care about.”— Jessica Lahey, well.blogs.nytimes.com
“There is endless complaining about the expectations put on creatives that don’t actually feel like a burden to actual creatives. Like, wow, 'create something today' how restrictive.”— Chrissy Stockton, chrissystockton.com
“As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.”— Alain de Botton, goodreads.com
“We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.”— Alain de Botton, amazon.com
“Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.”— Alain de Botton, amazon.com
“When the brain lights up, its activity is like a radio lighting up when music is played. It is an obvious fallacy to say that the radio composed the music. What is being viewed is only a physical correlation, not a cause.”— Deepak Chopra, huffingtonpost.com
“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort…”— David Foster Wallace, amazon.com
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, 'What the hell is water…”— David Foster Wallace, amazon.com
“We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to ke…”— Alain de Botton, amazon.com
“Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. The more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enter…”— Steven Pressfield, amazon.com
“So may you find in each other what you came here for. And trust that this is love because it is (love is trust). And tangled lives you may lead but into each other, never apart, 'till you cannot distinguish between being and being together.”— Iain Sinclair Thomas, amazon.com
“My mother died fast but not all of a sudden. A slow-burning fire when flames disappear to smoke and then smoke to air. She never once closed her eyes. First they were bitter and then they were bewildered and then they changed again to something else, to a state that I have had, finally, to see as he…”— Cheryl Strayed, junklit.com
“You work on yourself and you hope for the best, but you only get better — you don’t get perfect.”— Chrissy Stockton, thoughtcatalog.com
“There is just as much value in the negative space. Not every second of your life has to be filled. A packed agenda is not success. Living to work as opposed to working to live is not a quality of life. Things are not split into ‘times in which you’re doing something that other people can quantify’ a…”— Brianna Wiest, thoughtcatalog.com