You can only see this if you want to see it.
You can always remind yourself: I am in control, not my emotions. I see what’s really going on here. I’m not going to get excited or upset.
You are not your body and hair-style, but your capacity for choosing well. If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be. —EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES
Yes, we are small. We are also a piece of this great universe and a process.
Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself.
Work is finding yourself alone at the track when the weather kept everyone else indoors. Work is pushing through the pain and crappy first drafts and prototypes. It is ignoring whatever plaudits other...
Why bother getting mad at causes and forces far bigger than us? Why do we take these things personally? After all, external events are not sentient beings—they cannot respond to our shouts and cries—a...
Whether what you’re going through is your fault or your problem doesn’t matter, because it’s yours to deal with right now.
Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, your worst enemy already lives inside you: your ego.
Wherever there is a human being, we have an opportunity for kindness. —SENECA, ON THE HAPPY LIFE, 24.2–3
Where one is blinded by success, another sees reality with ruthless objectivity.
Whenever someone has done wrong by you, immediately consider what notion of good or evil they had in doing it. For when you see that, you’ll feel compassion, instead of astonishment or rage. For you m...
When you first rise in the morning tell yourself: I will encounter busybodies, ingrates, egomaniacs, liars, the jealous and cranks. They are all stricken with these afflictions because they don’t know...
When someone doesn’t reckon you with the seriousness that you’d like, the impulse is to correct them. (As we all wish to say: Do you know who I am?!) You want to remind them of what they’ve forgotten;...
When people ask where we are, what we’re doing, how that situation is coming along, the answer should be clear: We’re working on it. We’re getting closer. When setbacks come, we respond by working twi...
When it comes to money, where we feel our clear interest, we have an entire art where the tester uses many means to discover the worth . . . just as we give great attention to judging things that migh...
When I see an anxious person, I ask myself, what do they want? For if a person wasn’t wanting something outside of their own control, why would they be stricken by anxiety? —EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 2.1...
When I look up in the universe, I know I’m small, but I’m also big. I’m big because I’m connected to the universe and the universe is connected to me.
What’s the point of having countless books and libraries, whose titles could hardly be read through in a lifetime. The learner is not taught, but burdened by the sheer volume, and it’s better to plant...
Whatever we face, we have a choice: Will we be blocked by obstacles, or will we advance through and over them? We might not be emperors, but the world is still constantly testing us. It asks: Are you...