Listen to Marcus Aurelius’s empowering call to get active in your own rescue—if you care for yourself at all—and do it while you can.
When you can break apart something, or look at it from some new angle, it loses its power over you.
The single most important practice in Stoic philosophy is differentiating between what we can change and what we can’t. What we have influence over and what we do not.
Richard Branson likes to say, is that business opportunities are like buses; there’s always another coming around.
It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows, Epictetus says.
Is it ten thousand hours or twenty thousand hours to mastery? The answer is that it doesn't matter. There is no end zone. To think of a number is to live in a conditional future. We're simply talking...
Hecato says, ‘I can teach you a love potion made without any drugs, herbs, or special spell—if you would be loved, love.’ —SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 9.6
Epictetus is reminding you that serenity and stability are results of your choices and judgment, not your environment. If you seek to avoid all disruptions to tranquility—other people, external events...
At some time during the process, [of writing] I came up with a therapeutic device. After each draft I would tear up the pages and feed the paper to a worm compost I keep in my garage. A few months lat...
If it comes as a constant surprise each and every time something unexpected occurs, you're not only going to be miserable whenever you attempt something big, you're going to have a much harder time ac...
Sometimes the longest way around is the shortest way home.
We talk to fill the void and the uncertainty.
That’s how it seems to go: we’re never happy with what we have, we want what others have too. We want to have more than everyone else. We start out knowing what is important to us, but once we’ve achi...
Take a step back, then go around the problem. Find some leverage. Approach from what is called the line of least expectation. What’s your first instinct when faced with a challenge? Is it to outspend...
Our own path, whatever we aspire to, will in some ways be defined by the amount of nonsense we are willing to deal with. It doesn’t matter how talented you are, how great your connections are, how muc...
We must all either wear out or rust out, every one of us. My choice is to wear out. — THEODORE ROOSEVELT
We can learn to focus on what things really are.
Vires acquirit eundo
There are two ways to be wealthy—to get everything you want or to want everything you have.
The performance artist Marina Abramovic puts it directly: If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.