9 Quotes That Make Me Sit up & Think
1. Spiritual Minimalism
“In order to change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally, one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one’s mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use.”
2. The Essence of Self-Help
“To a disciple who was forever complaining about others, the Master said, ‘If it is peace you want, seek to change yourself, not other people. It is easier to protect your feet with slippers than to carpet the whole of the earth.”
3. Happiness is…
“I do not like the idea of happiness — it is too momentary. I would say that I was always busy and interested in something — interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happiness.”
4. Midlife and Beyond
“The second half of life is not a chronological moment but a psychological moment that some people, however old, however accomplished, however self-satisfied in life, never reach. The second half of life occurs when people, for whatever reason — death of partner, end of marriage, illness, retirement, whatever — are obliged to radically consider who they are apart from their history, their roles, and their commitments. Every young person “escapes” home and then goes out to repeat it, to be owned by it in overcompensation, or to attempt to “treat” it unconsciously through an addiction, a fugitive life, or some form of distraction. Given that the farther away one gets from those primal influences, the more these spectral influences still call the shots, most people sooner or later hit a wall. What they do then makes all the difference in their life.”
5. Everybody Worships
“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 of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”
6. It’s Okay to be Alone
“It is beautiful to be alone. To be alone does not mean to be lonely. It means the minds is not influenced and contaminated by society.”
7. Why Writing Makes Me Come Alive
“You can’t replace reading with other sources of information like videos, because you need to read in order to write well, and you need to write in order to think well.”
8. On Purpose
“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It’s time for that to end.”
9. Purposelessness
“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”