Character

Who are we?

“mere walking bundle of habits,”

Caleb Carr • The Alienist

Who am I when I can’t do what I do? Who am I when even life-sustaining connection with others is taken away?

Anne Berube • The Burnout Antidote

I feel this

Found in a letter to Peter Cundill, this reminder captures the quiet strength behind truly admirable people:

“The measure of a person is the congruence between their words and actions, their kindness, their confidence, and their decisiveness about who they are in the world and who they intend to remain.”

Let no one think it is an easy way because it is concerned with moments of happiness rather than with stern duty or high moral endeavour. For what is really easy, as I found, is to blind one’s eyes to what one really likes, to drift into accepting one’s wants ready-made from other people, and to evade the continual day to day sifting of values. And... See more

From the preface to ‘A Life of One’s Own’ by Marion Milner (Published under the pen name Joanna Field)

Bullshit, unlike lying, works by making you unconcerned with whether speech is true or false. The bullshitter, like the sophists of antiquity, does not appeal to any measure of truth outside of the needs of the moment. Instead, he tries to capture your attention with the catchiness of his claim and how much it provokes something inside of you: some

John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro, • Awakening From the Meaning Crisis

We go through life thinking everyone else has it better than us until we grow up and realize we’re all in our own tiny boats of self-doubt and second-guessing.”

Alexi Pappas

You must get the intrinsic reality clear within your soul — even if you betray it in reality, yet know it: that is everything. And know that in the end, always you keep the ultimate choice of your destiny: to abide by the intrinsic reality, or by the extrinsic: the choice is yours, do not let it slide from you, keep it always secure, reserved… Keep... See more

DH Lawrence - Letter to his friend Cynthia Asquith

It is tragic how few people ever possess their souls before they die. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry…”

There’s a scene in Hamlet where he’s pleading with his mother to break some of the destructive patterns in her life. “Assume a virtue, if you have it not,” he tells her. “Refrain to-night, and that shall lend a kind of easiness to the next abstinence; the next more easy: For use can almost change the stamp of nature.