Quotes
Every quote in this book, grouped by who said or wrote it and by what it’s from.
By author
By source
2007 USC Law School Commencement Speech
Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity add disastrous modes of thought. Self-pity can get pretty close to paranoia. Paranoia is one of the very hardest things to reverse. You do not want to drift into self-pity.
I had a friend who carried a thick stack of linen-based cards. When someone would make a comment that reflected self-pity, he would slowly and portentously pull out his huge stack of cards, take the top one, and hand it to the person. The card said, “Your story has touched my heart. Never have I heard of anyone with as many misfortunes as you.”
Well, you can say that’s waggery, but I suggest that every time you find you’re drifting into self-pity—I don’t care what the cause, your child could be dying of cancer, self-pity is not going to improve the situation—just give yourself one of those cards. It’s a ridiculous way to behave and when you avoid it you get a great advantage over everybody else, almost everybody else, because self-pity is a standard condition and yet you can train yourself out of it.
2025 letter
Steep yourself in the last months of 2015. The program AlphaGo has just defeated the European champion in Go, the first time a computer has ever beaten a human professional. The 18-time world champion Lee Sedol would be quite unmoved, remarking that “the level of the player that AlphaGo went against in October is not the same level as me.” (AlphaGo would defeat Lee the following March.) Elsewhere in the world, there is war in Ukraine. SpaceX landed its Falcon 9 for the first time. Star Wars: The Force Awakens premiered. A new startup called OpenAI was founded.
34 Lessons From Writing Every Day for Two Decades
When Winston Churchill was driven from power, he could have wallowed or retired. Instead, he became a one-man media company—publishing 11 books, 400 articles, and giving 350 speeches between 1931 and 1939. He became more famous in the U.S. than in Britain, delivering his message without intermediation. They tried to cancel him, but it didn’t work. That’s what I’ve built with The Daily Stoic. It’s not just an email list but also a YouTube Channel with 2M subscribers, an Instagram account with 3.4M followers, a Twitter account with 600K followers, a TikTok page with 800K followers, and a Facebook page with 1M followers. It’s Stoicism directly to the people.
A Bona Fide Killer, episode 7
After nearly dying recently, I realized a few things. I mean... Just looking at the sky, watching the leaves change. "Wow, I'm glad I'm alive." "It's good to be alive." Joking around with friends, getting nagged by your family, worrying about silly things like, "What should I eat today?" or "What should I wear tomorrow?" That ordinary everyday life is precious. It's really is precious.
A book can’t change your life
A book can’t change your life. But you can. Especially if your community is there to help. All help is self-help, multiplied by the expectations, support and compassion of the people around you.
A Calendar of Wisdom
The more urgently you want to speak, the most likely it is that you will say something foolish.
If you care too much about being praised, in the end you will not accomplish anything serious. People have different values. You may say, "I want good people to value me," but you know you will respect only those who praise your actions.
You cannot send away a bad thought when it appears in your mind, but you can create other thoughts which will weaken or destroy this bad thought. For example, I may imagine that your friend or neighbor has some drawback, and I may not be able to banish this thought, but when I concentrate on the thought that criticizing another person is bad because I am not perfect, and he has the same God within him as I have within me, then I cannot stop loving this person.
A person understands himself not through thoughts, but with actions. It is only through making an effort that a person will understand his worth.
There is nothing more important than an example. It leads us to do good deeds which would be impossible without this example. Therefore, if we use dissipated or passionate or cruel people as examples, it destroys our soul. The contrary is also true.
A Short Guide to a Happy Life
Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. That's what I have to say. The second is only a part of the first.
"If you win the rat race, you're still a rat."
When you leave college, there are thousands of people out there with the same degree you have; when you get a job, there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life.
I'm a good mother to three good children. I have tried never to let my profession stand in the way of being a good parent. I no longer consider myself the center of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make my marriage vows mean what they say. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.
You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.
So I supposed the best piece of advice I could give anyone is pretty simple: get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house.
Turn off your cell phone. Turn off your regular phone, for that matter. Keep still. Be present.
It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes... It is so easy to exist instead of live. Unless you know there is a clock ticking.
And I went back to school and I looked around at all the kids I knew who found it kind of a drag and who weren't sure if they could really hack it and who thought life was a bummer. And I knew that I had undergone a sea change. Because I was never again going to be able to see life as anything except a great gift.
C'mon, let's be honest. We have an embarrassment of riches. Life is good. I don't mean in any cosmic way. I never think of my life, or my world, in any big cosmic way. I think of it in all its small component parts: the snowdrops, the daffodils; the feeling of one of my kids sitting close beside me on the couch; the way my husband looks when he reads with the lamp behind him; fettuccine Alfredo, fudge; Gone with the Wind, Pride and Prejudice. Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won't happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live.
I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that this is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get.
School never ends. The classroom is everywhere. The exam comes at the very end. No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Almost Certainly Do Again
In some of my social circles, the idea of The Fun Scale is frequently discussed. Type 1 fun is fun while it’s happening, and fun to reflect on after—think a day at the park or seeing your favorite movie on the big screen for the fifth time. Type 2 fun is miserable while it is happening, but once the pain and suffering is over, you look back on it fondly. For Type 2 fun, the parts that you hated in the moment become the most indelible memories; this is what keeps runners coming back, marathon after marathon, even when they’ve sworn this would be their last. Type 3 you wish didn’t happen: not fun at the time and not fun in retrospect; a broken bone, food poisoning from that new Thai spot, let it never be discussed again.
Adam Mastroianni writes essays that expand my mind
The mark of a good piece is that I didn’t know the end of it when I started it.
AI, tools and transformation
There’s an old joke that an engineer is someone who’ll spend an hour building a tool to automate a task that would take 10 minutes. But with AI, now you can make that tool in five minutes, and you don't need to be an engineer, and you don’t need to write code. You can just ask the model to make the tool for you, or, more fundamentally, just do the task for you itself.
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
Josiah Franklin’s new house, coupled with the dwindling number of children still living with him, allows him to entertain interesting guests for dinner. “At his table,” Benjamin recalled, “he liked to have, as often as he could, some sensible friend or neighbor to converse with, and always took care to start some ingenious or useful topic for discourse which might tend to improve the minds of his children.”
that nothing was useful which was not honest
Breaking Through: My Life in Science
Do not believe that hard work and happiness are in opposition. Do not believe that one must embrace leisure to know joy.
Cargo Cult Science
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.
Charlie Munger’s Interview with Todd Combs
No, I’m more interested in the investment operations of the world. I’m interested in the others, too, but the ones I can’t fix, I don’t spend much time on them. I don’t know how to fix [inaudible]. I’d love to be able to wave my hand and solve that problem, but I don’t think that’s given to man, to fix some of those problems. So I just stay away from the problems that can’t be fixed and pick the ones that can — I don’t like unlimited failure. I don’t want to fish forever and never catch a fish. I have to have some reinforcement. And so I pick some things that can be done and do them. But I do think that if you’re reasonably obsessed with something, even if it’s intermittent, and you have a long attention span, you keep working over the serious problems, that you’ll stumble into an answer. That’s half the secret of life.
Confucius Analects
4.1 The Master said, "To live in the neighborhood of the Good is fine. If one does not choose to dwell among those who are Good, how will one obtain wisdom?"
子曰：「里仁為美。擇不處仁，焉得知？」
The Master said, "When you see someone who is worthy, concentrate upon becoming their equal; when you see someone who is unworthy, use this as an opportunity to look within yourself."
子曰：「見賢思齊焉，見不賢而內自省也。」
1.1:
子曰：「學而時習之，不亦說乎？有朋自遠方來，不亦樂乎？人不知而不慍，不亦君子乎？」
The Master said, "To learn and then have occasion to practice what you have learned — is this not satisfying? To have friends arrive from afar — is this not a joy? To be patient even when others do not understand — is this not the mark of the gentleman?"
15.24:
子貢問曰：「有一言而可以終身行之者乎？」子曰：「其恕乎！己所不欲，勿施於人。」
Zi Gong asked, saying, "Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one's life?" The Master said, "Is not RECIPROCITY such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others."
13.17:
子夏為莒父宰，問政。子曰：「无欲速，无见小利。欲速则不达，见小利则大事不成」
Zi Xia, being governor of Ju Fu, asked about government. The Master said, "Do not be desirous to have things done quickly; do not look at small advantages. Desire to have things done quickly prevents their being done thoroughly. Looking at small advantages prevents great affairs from being accomplished."
2.24:
子曰：「非其鬼而祭之，諂也。見義不為，無勇也。」
The Master said, "To sacrifice to spirits that are not one's own is to be presumptuous. To see what is right, but to fail to do it, is to be lacking in courage."
3.7:
子曰：「君子無所爭，必也射乎！揖讓而升，下而飲，其爭也君子。」
The Master said, “A person of virtue has no contentions, except perhaps in archery! They bow and yield to each other as they go up [to the shooting platform], and come down to drink [the penalty cup if they lose]. Their competition is that of a gentleman (junzi).”
4.1
子曰：「里仁為美。擇不處仁，焉得知？」
The Master said, "To live in the neighborhood of the Good is fine. If one does not choose to dwell among those who are Good, how will one obtain wisdom?"
4.17
子曰：「見賢思齊焉，見不賢而內自省也。」
The Master said, "When you see someone who is worthy, concentration upon becoming their equal; when you see someone who is unworthy, use this as an opportunity to look within yourself."
2.24: The Master said, "To sacrifice to spirits that are not one's own is to be presumptuous. To see what is right, but to fail to do it, is to be lacking in courage."
4.9: The Master said, "With regard to the world, the gentleman has no predispositions for or against any person [or affairs]. He merely associates with those he considers right."
子曰：「君子之於天下也，無適也，無莫也，義之與比。」
Daemons of the Shadow Realm, episode 21
I'd love to watch a ball game together. I want to hang out with everyone at places like that. Attend school and whine about studying like a normal kid. Scream about wanting a hot boyfriend. Complain about work on a commuter train. I want to live a normal life.
Daily Dad
Late in his reign, a friend spotted Marcus [Aurelius] heading out, carrying a stack of books. "Where are you going?" he asked. Marcus was on his way to a lecture on Stoicism, he said, for "learning is a good things, even for one who is growing old. I am now on my way to Sextus the philosopher to learn what I do not yet know."
If you want your kids to value learning, if you want them to never stop furthering the education you've been investing so much time and money and care and worry into, then we have to show them what an adult committed to lifelong learning actually looks like.
The Stoic philosopher Seneca got front-row seats to one of the worst parenting jobs in history. In 49 AD, he was recalled from exile to tutor a twelve-year-old named Nero. The ancient historian Cassius Dio tells us that the boy's mother, the empress Agrippina, had the entire empire under her thumb and used her power to make sure her boy never had to struggle for anything. She is what we today call a snowplow parent. And in clearing the path of every conceivable impediment and obstacle, Agrippina created a monster, one of the worst human beings in history.
...
The job of "the good parent," he says, is to "out of love for the child, [act] as a trainer, endlessly manufacturing trials for the child." The job of the good parent is to make their child's life good, not easy.
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The gods, Seneca writes, "want us to be as good, as virtuous as possible, so assign to us a fortune that will make us struggle." Without struggle, he says, "no one will know what you were capable of, not even yourself."
(Page 303)
Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
Who we are and how we engage with the world are much stronger predictors of how our children will do than what we know about parenting.
Developing Creative Identity
Both Brand and Darwin are writing to discover. But they're doing it in different ways. Darwin only decided to write the Origin after he'd already understood the principle of evolution by natural selection. That is, he had not only his question, but also confidence in his answer, building on decades of prior work and creative output. And so Darwin is sharpening and developing an idea he already believes; he also, en route, discovers many surprising implications and applications. By contrast, Brand seems to have begun with a question, and discovered the basic shape of his answer through the writing process.
Writing is a miraculous technology to support exploration and discovery, enabling a kind of gradient ascent in human understanding. You make tiny improvements, over and over. It may be a word or phrase you throw out and replace with a better; it may be an entire book. Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have thrown the first draft of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" into the fire. You write down your confusions, your discomforts, your exceptions, your crazy ideas. And slowly, you agglomerate improvement. You can keep improving for years. I do not believe you can think well without using an external medium [^33], something to help you improve thoughts too complex for your unaided mind. This can be a trudge, all those often tiny improvements in understanding. But it adds up and at peak moments is transformative. As the New Yorker editor William Shawn said to John McPhee: "It takes as long as it takes." And for those of us developing new creative identities, writing is one of the most powerful servants we have.
feed it to your children
Never lose your sense of wonder.
Guard it the way you would a small flame in bad weather.
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
regardless of any problems, obstacles, or more attractive options that may come along later, one is freed of the constant pressure of trying to maximize emotional returns having made the commitment… and having made it willingly instead of being compelled by tradition, a person no longer needs to worry whether she has made the right choice, or whether the grass might be greener somewhere else. As a result a great deal of energy gets freed up for living, instead of being spent on wondering about how to live.
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End
Adventures are made up of ordinary, shitty days like these.
“Even if things don’t go as you hoped for, it’s fine as long as the process was fun”
Getting Critical
Critical theory’s job is to thaw what has been frozen. To remind us that the rules we’re following were written by someone, and can be rewritten.
Critical theory’s job is to thaw what has been frozen. To remind us that the rules we’re following were written by someone, and can be rewritten.
Getting into Print
Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter, and lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.
Golden
"No, my dear. Sadness might be many things, but it is rarely stupid. The good sadness, I think, is always trying to tell us something very important."
Henry Miller Memorial Library
Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music — the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget
How not to forget what matters
During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, there spread a practice known as hypomnēmata, a type of notetaking system, used as a tool for meditation,1 in which the writer would store quotes from books they had read. Each day, often in the morning, the notetaker would open their notebook and look for a passage relevant to something they were struggling with, and then they would meditate on that—unpacking it, making the idea top of mind, ensuring it was alive in them. If they needed courage, for instance, they could meditate on an anecdote that made it real for them what it meant to act bravely. The idea was that over time, the insights they gathered by reading would be transformed into character, something deeply ingrained in their way of thinking and seeing and acting.
...
The most famous example of this practice is the meditations Marcus Aurelius wrote in his tent as plague swept through the camps during the military campaigns along the Danube River, but it seems to have been a fairly widespread practice among the “cultivated class.” A suggestion repeated in several popular manuals for living was that you should collect every snippet of thought that deeply inspires you to live in a more ethically true way and then, in the pre-dawn hour, look through your hypomnēmata to find passages relevant to your current situation—insightful quotes, examples, actions you had witnessed, notes from conversations you’d had, and so on—and meditate, in writing, on those that help you orient toward your current challenges, until you feel inspired to act in the proper way.
how to cultivate your own taste…and how to protect your inner life while posting online
I’ve been reading very little this week and reconciling with nature instead—swimming, cycling, and applying large quantities of sunscreen
How to Talk so Little Kids will Listen
I’m not the perfect parent; I get into plenty of conflicts with my children. But I do have skills to help get us through those conflicts, and I use them every day.
How UCLA Coach John Wooden Learned About Building Men
Two Sets of Three
Never lie, never cheat, never steal. Don’t whine, don’t complain, don’t make excuses.
How Will You Measure Your Life?
In the words of Andy Grove: “To understand a company’s strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they will do.” Resource allocation works pretty much the same way in our lives and careers.
[my classmates who inadvertently invested in lives of hollow happiness] prioritized things that gave them immediate returns—such as a promotion, a raise, or a bonus—rather than the things that require long-term work, the things that you won’t see a return on for decades, like raising good children. And when those immediate returns were delivered, they used them to finance a high-flying lifestyle for themselves and their families: better cars, better houses, and better vacations. The problem is, lifestyle demands can quickly lock in place the personal resource allocation process. “I can’t devote less time to my job because I won’t get that promotion—and I need that promotion …”
As such, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that anyone can offer you. The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg. As a parent, you will try many things with your child that simply won’t work. When this happens, it can be very easy to view it as a failure. Don’t. If anything, it’s the opposite. If you recount our discussion of emergent and deliberate strategy—the balance between your plans and unanticipated opportunities—then you’ll know that getting something wrong doesn’t mean you have failed. Instead, you have just learned what does not work. You now know to try something else.
I Deleted My Second Brain
PKM systems promise coherence, but they often deliver a kind of abstracted confusion. The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.
Incentives are for losers
COME HELMET OR HIGH WATER
When I played Little League baseball for a few disastrous years, my least favorite part was going up to bat, because you had to wear one of these ratty old batting helmets supplied by the local rec department. None of them fit right, and they all smelled like a hundred sweaty 10-year-olds had worn them before you, because a hundred sweaty 10-year-olds had worn them before you. And so every at-bat carried not only the risk of striking out, but also the risk of contracting head lice.2
A few kids, the serious ones, brought their own helmets—custom fitted, tastefully decorated with decals, and presumably containing zero lice. These kids ran the bases like little princes. Any errant pitches bounced harmlessly off their heads, leaving their perfect skulls un-dented. The outfielders would perk up whenever a kid with a bespoke helmet stepped up to the plate, all of them thinking to themselves, this kid might actually hit the ball.
I say all this because incentives are like batting helmets: if you don’t bring your own, you’ll have to use the crappy ones that are provided for you.
A critical part of human development—in fact, the most human part of human development—is to acquire a purpose. That means refining your sense of right and wrong and figuring out how you, personally, can increase the right and decrease the wrong. Once your neural tube has ballooned into a brain, once you can poop without issue, conjugate irregular verbs, and feed yourself solid foods, you ought to ask yourself, “Why am I doing these things?” What’s it all for? How can I make myself useful?
Journals
Livet skal forstaas baglaens, men leves forlaens
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards
Latent Space as a New Medium
The model isn’t reasoning privately and then writing it down — the writing-it-down is the reasoning.
Letter to Miguel Serrano (September 14, 1960)
No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.
Letters to a Young Poet
I want to ask you, as clearly as I can , to bear with patience all that is unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves, as if they were rooms yet to enter or books written in a foreign language. Don’t dig for answers that can’t be given you yet: you cannot live them now. For everything must be lived. Live the questions now, perhaps then, someday, you will gradually, without noticing, live into the answer.
Lovingly launching your kids through the school gates
Here’s the thing. We all know we shouldn’t wish away the last days of summer—calculating the remaining time until they’re finally standing awkwardly on the front doorstep, forcing out a smile, for that quintessential “first day back” photo. But you can’t help calendar-watch. In the last few days, I’ve had countless friends message to share their delight in being back on the school run, and having a clean, quiet home to return to. I feel guilty thinking about it, and wrong writing about it. Because the number of summers we’ll spend with our kids is finite, and one day they won’t want to spend them with us.
mushroom season
I have been told that they signal health and that they will soon relent to the soil beneath summer's crushing embrace.
My Second Child Is Perfect. He Ruined My Life
At first, I assumed that Cy was basically just a smaller version of Knox. That he, too, in time, would do all the same Knox stuff. A new model of the same device. It took me longer than it should’ve to realize he was someone else entirely.
Many days I find myself trying to explain to Knox or Cy the job of a brother: Protect each other at all costs, is what I try to reinforce. Be an ally to him, even against us. Especially against us.
Of Studies
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know, that he doth not.
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know, that he doth not.
On the Education of Children
Let him make him examine and thoroughly sift everything he reads, and lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon trust. Aristotle’s principles will then be no more principles to him, than those of Epicurus and the Stoics: let this diversity of opinions be propounded to, and laid before him; he will himself choose, if he be able; if not, he will remain in doubt.
Let him examine every man’s talent; a peasant, a bricklayer, a passenger: one may learn something from every one of these in their several capacities, and something will be picked out of their discourse whereof some use may be made at one time or another; nay, even the folly and impertinence of others will contribute to his instruction. By observing the graces and manners of all he sees, he will create to himself an emulation of the good, and a contempt of the bad.
Let an honest curiosity be suggested to his fancy of being inquisitive after everything; whatever there is singular and rare near the place where he is, let him go and see it; a fine house, a noble fountain, an eminent man, the place where a battle has been anciently fought, the passages of Cæsar and Charlemagne:
Quæ tellus sit lenta gelu, quæ putris ab æstu,
Ventus in Italiam quis bene vela ferat.What country is bound in frost, what land is friable with heat, what wind serves fairest for Italy.Prop. (4.3.39)
Let him inquire into the manners, revenues, and alliances of princes, things in themselves very pleasant to learn, and very useful to know.
And so of all the rest. Pythagoras was wont to say, that our life resembles the great and populous assembly of the Olympic games, wherein some exercise the body, that they may carry away the glory of the prize; others bring merchandise to sell for profit; there are, also, some (and those none of the worst sort) who pursue no other advantage than only to look on, and consider how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of the lives of other men, thereby the better to judge of and regulate their own.
To examples may fitly be applied all the profitable discourses of philosophy, to which all human actions, as to their best rule, ought to be especially directed: a scholar shall be taught to know —
Quid fas optare, quid asper
Utile nummus habet; patrix carisque propinquis
Quantum elargiri deceat; quem te Deus esse
Jussit, et humana qua parte locatus es in re;
Quid sumus, aut quidnam victuri gignimur —Learn what it is right to wish; what is the true use of coined money; how much it becomes us to give in liberality to our country and our dear relations; whom and what the Deity commanded thee to be; and in what part of the human system thou art placed; what we are and to what purpose engendered.Pers. (3.69)
what it is to know, and what to be ignorant; what ought to be the end and design of study; what valor, temperance, and justice are; the difference betwixt ambition and avarice, servitude and subjection, licence and liberty; by what token a man may know true and solid contentment; how far death, affliction, and disgrace are to be apprehended;
Et quo quemque modo fugiatque feratque laborem;
And how you may shun or sustain every hardship.Verg., Aen. (3.459)
by what secret springs we move, and the reason of our various agitations and irresolutions: for, methinks the first doctrine with which one should season his understanding, ought to be that which regulates his manners and his sense; that teaches him to know himself, and how both well to die and well to live. Among the liberal sciences, let us begin with that which makes us free.
Not that they do not all serve in some measure to the instruction and use of life, as all other things in some sort also do; but let us make choice of that which directly and professedly serves to that end.
But the governor that I would have, that is such a one as knows it to be his duty to possess his pupil with as much or more affection than reverence to virtue, will be able to inform him, that the poets have evermore accommodated themselves to the public humor, and make him sensible, that the gods have planted more toil and sweat in the avenues of the cabinets of Venus than in those of Minerva. And when he shall once find him begin to apprehend, and shall represent to him a Bradamante or an Angelica for a mistress, a natural, active, generous, and not a viragoish, but a manly beauty, in comparison of a soft, delicate, artificial, simpering, and affected form; the one in the habit of a heroic youth, wearing a glittering helmet, the other tricked up in curls and ribbons like a wanton minx; he will then look upon his own affection as brave and masculine, when he shall choose quite contrary to that effeminate shepherd of Phrygia. Such a tutor will make a pupil digest this new lesson, that the height and value of true virtue consists in the facility, utility, and pleasure of its exercise; so far from difficulty, that boys, as well as men, and the innocent as well as the subtle, may make it their own: it is by order, and not by force, that it is to be acquired. Socrates, her first minion, is so averse to all manner of violence, as totally to throw it aside, to slip into the more natural facility of her own progress; ’tis the nursing mother of all human pleasures, who in rendering them just, renders them also pure and permanent; in moderating them, keeps them in breath and appetite; in interdicting those which she herself refuses, whets our desire to those that she allows; and, like a kind and liberal mother, abundantly allows all that nature requires, even to satiety, if not to lassitude: unless we mean to say, that the regimen which stops the toper before he has drunk himself drunk, the glutton before he has eaten to a surfeit, and the lecher before he has got the pox, is an enemy to pleasure. If the ordinary fortune fail, she does without it, and forms another, wholly her own, not so fickle and unsteady as the other. She can be rich, be potent and wise, and knows how to lie upon soft perfumed beds: she loves life, beauty, glory, and health; but her proper and peculiar office is to know how to regulate the use of all these good things, and how to lose them without concern: an office much more noble than troublesome, and without which the whole course of life is unnatural, turbulent, and deformed, and there it is indeed, that men may justly represent those monsters upon rocks and precipices. If this pupil shall happen to be of so contrary a disposition, that he had rather hear a tale of a tub than the true narrative of some noble expedition or some wise and learned discourse; who at the beat of drum, that excites the youthful ardor of his companions, leaves that to follow another that calls to a morris or the bears; who would not wish, and find it more delightful and more excellent, to return all dust and sweat victorious from a battle, than from tennis or from a ball, with the prize of those exercises; I see no other remedy, but that he be bound prentice in some good town to learn to make minced pies, though he were the son of a duke; according to Plato’s precept, that children are to be placed out and disposed of, not according to the wealth, qualities, or condition of the father, but according to the faculties and the capacity of their own souls.
On the Shortness of Life
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in headless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.
On Writing
You can’t be a good writer without being a devoted reader.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut… If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.
If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or tools) to write. Simple as that.
Oscar-Nominated 'Phantom Thread' Focuses On Fashion's 'Most Obsessive'
I still have trouble reading a book during the day because it somehow feels indulging… You know, like oh, my – this is so naughty. I’m actually reading at 10 o’clock in the morning. I think it’s just your upbringing – something about like you got to go to work, and you’ve got to – and move on. And still even – this is how I make my living. I still feel guilty. 10 o’clock, I mean – and it’s – but I’ve sunken into the pleasure of it – to think, my God, I’ve got my life in a way where I can read a book in the middle of the day.
Pensées
Give children, therefore, the light that serves to distinguish good from evil in all things, without trying to teach them every single bad thing and every single good thing—an immense and impossible task; they will distinguish it well enough for themselves.
Children must have a governor inside themselves: it is better placed there and more diligent than at their side. All children are disposed to receive it, and there is a place in their conscience always ready for it.
Personal Renewal
One of the enemies of sound, lifelong motivation is a rather childish conception we have of the kind of concrete, describable goal toward which all of our efforts drive us. We want to believe that there is a pint at which we can feel that we have arrived. We want a scoring system that tells us when we've piled up enough points to count ourselves successful.
So you scramble and sweat and climb to reach what you thought was the goal. When you get to the top you stand up and look around and chances are you feel a little empty. Maybe more than a little empty.
You wondered whether you climbed the wrong mountain.
Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities, I mean not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one's capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring.
Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experiences of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.
You have to building meaning into your life, and you build it through your commitments—whether to your religion, to an ethical order as you conceive it, to your life's work, to loved ones, to your fellow humans. Young people run around searching for identity, but it isn't handed out free any more—not in this transient, rootless, pluralistic society. Your identity is what you've committed yourself to.
There are men and women who make the world better just by being the kind of people they are. They have the gift of kindness, or courage or loyalty or integrity. It matters very little whether they're behind the wheel of a truck or running a country store or bringing up a family.
There's a myth that learning is for young people. But as the proverb says, "It's what you learn after you know it all that counts." The middle years are great, great learning years. Even the years past the middle years. I took on a new job after my 77th birthday—and I'm still learning.
You have within you more resources of energy than have ever been tapped, more talent than has ever been exploited, more strength than has ever been tested, more to give than you have ever given.
When you hit a spell of trouble, ask "What is it trying to teach me?" The lessons aren't always happy ones, but they keep coming. It isn't a bad idea to pause occasionally for an inward look. By midlife, most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.
We learn by growing older, by suffering, by loving, by bearing with the things we can't change, by taking risks.
As Norman Douglas said "There are some things you can't learn from others. You have to pass through the fire."
The future is not shaped by people who don't really believe in the future.
You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you, they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.
The question isn't did you fail but did you pick yourself up and move ahead? And there is one other little question: 'Did you collaborate in your own defeat?' A lot of people do. Learn not to.
The thing you have to understand is that the capacities you actually develop to the full come out as the result of an interplay between you and life's challenges—and the challenges keep changing. Life pulls things out of you.
Failure is simply a reason to strength resolve.
"It's all right to be a late bloomer if you don't miss the flower show." Churchill didn't miss it.
You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs.
You find that the world loves talent, but pays off on character.
You learn the arts of mutual dependence, meeting the needs of loves ones and letting yourself need them.
Portrait of the Artist as a Naughty Boy
In one gallery, they actually had a notice which said, 'No Sketching.' How obnoxious! I said, 'How do you think these things got on the walls if there was no sketching?'
Putting Ideas into Words
The reason I've spent so long establishing this rather obvious point [that writing helps you refine your thinking] is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.
It feels to them as if they do, especially if they're not in the habit of critically examining their own thinking. Ideas can feel complete. It's only when you try to put them into words that you discover they're not. So if you never subject your ideas to that test, you'll not only never have fully formed ideas, but also never realize it.
Silence: In the Age of Noise
The secret to walking to the South Pole is to put one foot in front of the other, and to do this enough times. On a purely technical scale this is quite simple. Even a mouse can eat an elephant if it takes small enough bites. The challenge lies in the desire.
So What Do You Do, Nicholas Sparks, Bestselling Romance Novelist?
You have to set aside time. I mean, you can have plenty of time for both. You just have to give up something else. You might have to give up television or reading the newspaper or things like that, you know. If you’re serious about writing, there’s enough time. If you take away, let’s say, nine hours of working and commuting and eight hours of sleep — and not everyone even gets eight hours — you still have seven hours left in a day to eat and exercise.
Even if you’re down to five or six, you can spend time with the family. You can still squeeze in time to write. For instance, I did it when my wife was going to bed early. You can also get up very early and write before you go to work.
Storyworthy
"The other reason I can recommend storytelling, and learning about it with the book you're holding, is that we're all disappearing — you, me, everyone we know and love. A little heavy for a foreword maybe, but when you tell stories, you do yourself a kind favor by taking a moment to write your name in the wet cement of life before you head to whatever is next. This is a much more selfless act than conventional wisdom would have you believe. It's a little like leaving a note in the logbook on the trail that others will be hiking after you, a note that might give the next hiker a clue."
If you’re a parent, you know this is true. Our lives are filled with beautiful, unforgettable moments with our children that turn out to be entirely and tragically forgettable.
The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read
Some mothers feel guilty about or let down by their birthing experiences. But remember, there is no such thing as perfect. All of life is about getting back on course each time the path takes an undesirable turn. It isn’t what goes wrong that matters so much as how we make things right again. And you’re getting back on track as you learn to get to know your baby and form that bond.
To allow a baby to follow their instinct to do their own breast crawl or any other natural action, like gazing at you, crying for you, is to respect them and to trust them and from the start to help them to know that they are not an object that things are just done to but a person who has agency.
The Diamond Age
there is an ineffable quality to some technology, described by its creators as concinnitous, or technically sweet, or a nice hack—signs that it was made with great care by one who was not merely motivated but inspired.
The Discipline Required To Create The Life You Want
You might ask: “But isn’t this a privileged way to live?” Yes, I do feel very privileged that for me happiness is relatively cheap. My ideal day doesn’t require me to be rich or powerful or important. It just requires that I be good enough at something to sell my services on the open market and strong enough to say no to things that are beyond my needs. That is a privilege, and it’s more accessible than we think. There are plenty of billionaires who don’t have it, plenty of ordinary people who have never lost it.
So it doesn’t take some enormous amount of money. Nor do you have to be famous or well-connected or wildly successful.
It takes discipline.
The discipline to figure out what you actually want your life to look like.
So it doesn’t take some enormous amount of money. Nor do you have to be famous or well-connected or wildly successful.
It takes discipline.
The discipline to figure out what you actually want your life to look like.
The discipline to turn down cool, lucrative opportunities. =
The discipline to say no to the investors, the acquirers, the well-meaning people who have ideas for how you can really blow this thing up.
The discipline to not go past the mark you aimed for.
The discipline to not scale.
The Great Gatsby
They were at least agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key.
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life’s as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all of the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’
The Notebook
The sketchbook also allowed an artist to develop their own style and repertoire, an additional memory bank that collected a body of material to refer to at a later date.
We should note, too, that the labour involved in copying out a chunk of literature changes the way the copyist relates to it. Transcribing a poem or letter forces the writer to read it multiple times, paying attention to the fine details of word selection and word order, and to consequently enjoy what one scholar calls 'a more intimate and meaningful experience than they could have with purchased texts'. You only take on the significant labour of such copying if you really enjoy the text, and you then find that you come to know it and appreciate it much better.
Fra Luca wrote informally, in Tuscan, not Latin, making it accessible to anyone with a basic education.
And one of the first lessons that its aspirational readers digested was that every business needed at least four blank books - the memoriale, or day book, the giornale, or journal, the quaderno, or general ledger, and a book for correspondence - and maybe even a fifth, the squartafoglio, or waste book. These had to be properly kept to avoid 'great trouble and confusion'. Your fortune depended on your notebooks and on how well you used them.
We should note, too, that the labour involved in copying out a chunk of literature changes the way the copyist relates to it. Transcribing a poem or letter forced the writer to read it multiple times, paying attention to the fine details of word selection and word order, and to consequently enjoy what one scholar calls ‘a more intimate and meaningful experience than they could have with purchased texts.’ You only take on the significant labour of such copying if you really enjoy the text, and you then find that you come to know it and appreciate it much better.
[Fra Luca] Pacioli’s remarkable achievements in collecting and disseminating the mathematical knowledge of his day make him one of the most important figures in Europe’s intellectual history, despite the fact that he had no significant ideas of his own.
The sketchbook also allowed an artist to develop their own style and repertoire, an additional memory bank that collected a body of material to refer to at a later date.
"Hockney's telling point is that it is not enough merely to look at a work: if an artist wants to learn from it, they need to make their own record of it, and in doing so, come to fathom it better."
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci
And take a note... with slight strokes in a little book that you should always carry with you... preserved with great care; for the forms, and positions of objects are so infinite that the memory is incapable of retaining them, wherefore keep these sketches as your guides and masters.
The Rambler
Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.
The Taste of Banzo's Sword
“How long will it take for me to learn?” Matajuro asked.
“A boy of your age?” said Banzo. “Ten years.”
“That’s too long!” Matajuro cried. “What if I practice every day, day and night— how long then?”
“Every day, day and night?” said Banzo. “In that case, twenty years.”
“I mean if I practice all day long, every day, without fail—do nothing but kendo— how long then?”
“In that case,” said Banzo, “thirty years. A fellow in a hurry never learns anything fast.”
Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence: The Diaries of Buonaccorso Pitti and Gregorio Dati
1 January 1404
I know that in this wretched life our sins expose us to many tribulations of soul and passions of the body... I also see that since my birth forty years ago, I have given little heed to God's commandments. Distrusting my own power to reform, but hoping to advance by degrees along the path of virtue, I resolve from this day forward to refrain from going to the shop or conducting business on solemn church holidays... Whenever I make exceptions I promise to distribute alms of one gold florin to God's poor. I have written this down so that I may remember my promise and be ashamed if I should chance to break it.
Walden
The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?
Walking Norway's Gudbrandsdalsleden Pilgrimage
"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work," as the old Flaubert line goes; "regular" days feel great to me now.
As expected, the walk finished and my brain felt squeezed dry. I do more talking during these weeks than I do in an average quarter. So by day seven, my introverted soul is battered, but my heart is full. Spending a week with seven or eight inspired people and watching their personalities and quirks and kindnesses unfold each day, that does something good to your noggin. By the end, you’re bigger, and you hope everyone else feels similarly.
What to Make of a Life
"In the interim I was not invited to give lectures or seminars, except on rare occasions, or to serve on committees or panels, or to perform other scientists' duties. Instead of causing personal difficulties, this long interval proved to be a delight. It allowed complete freedom to continue investigations without interruption, and for the pure joy they provided."
"In the interim I was not invited to give lectures or seminars, except on rare occasions, or to serve on committees or panels, or to perform other scientists' duties. Instead of causing personal difficulties, this long interval proved to be a delight. It allowed complete freedom to continue investigations without interruption, and for the pure joy they provided."
What will we use our minds for?
The knowledge that a machine can make a better [chess] move hasn't eliminated the joy of finding your own.
My attention feels like dandelion seeds scattered to the winds, each branching into new territory rather than deepening its roots.
Why I Write
I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.
Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off The Court
You have to apply yourself each day to become a little better. By applying yourself to the task of becoming a little better each and every day over a period of time, you will become a lot better. Only then will you be able to approach being the best you can be. It begins by trying to make each day count and knowing you can never make up for a lost day.
If a player appeared to be taking it easy in practice, I told him, “Don’t think you can make it up for it by working twice as hard tomorrow. If you have it within your power to work twice as hard, why aren’t you doing it now?”
Two Sets of Threes
Never lie.
Never cheat.
Never steal.Don’t whine.
Don’t complain.
Don’t make excuses.
Write Till You Drop
Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.
It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn. A project that takes five years will accumulate those years' inventions and richnesses. Much of those years' reading will feed the work. Further, writing sentences is difficult whatever their subject. It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in ''Moby-Dick.'' So you might as well write ''Moby-Dick.'' Similarly, since every original work requires a unique form, it is more prudent to struggle with the outcome of only one form - that of a long work - than to struggle with the many forms of a collection.
''Each student of the ferns,'' I once read, ''will have his own list of plants that for some reason or another stir his emotions.''
The writer knows her field - what has been done, what could be done, the limits - the way a tennis player knows the court. And like that expert, she, too, plays the edges. That is where the exhilaration is. She hits up the line.
At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.
One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
Writing to Learn
Once again I was stuck by one of the miracles of the cognitive process—that the act of writing will summon from the buried past exactly what we need exactly when we need it.
He went down more slowly than any fighter had ever gone down, he went down like a large ship which turns in end and slides second by second into its grave. As he went down, the sound of Griffith’s punches echoed in the mind like heavy ax in the distance chopping into a wet log.
You Learn By Living: 11 Keys for a More Fulfilling Life
Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively.