A Farewell to Arms. He wrote, “The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.”

“I promise you it didn’t make him bitter.”

that I was a prisoner to my own thoughts. The result was a sort of treadmill of pain and frustration, and I needed to figure out why—unless I wanted to break in an equally tragic fashion.

All great men and women went through difficulties to get to where they are, all of them made mistakes. They found within those experiences some benefit—even if it was simply the realization that they were not infallible and that things would not always go their way. They found that self-awareness was the way out and through—if they hadn’t, they

“That on which you so pride yourself will be your ruin,” Montaigne had inscribed on the beam of his ceiling. It’s a quote from the playwright Menander, and it ends with “you who think yourself to be someone.”

Ego is its own worst enemy.

dangerous delusions: entitlement, control, and paranoia.

With their aggression, intensity, self-absorption, and endless self-promotion, our competitors don’t realize how they jeopardize their own efforts (to say nothing of their sanity).

If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way. —EMILE ZOLA