on life
If it keeps bringing your attention back toward it, there is a lesson within it that still needs to be extracted
Brianna W
The way to greater confidence is not to reassure ourselves of our own dignity; it’s to come to peace with our inevitable ridiculousness
— Alain de Botton in ‘On Confidence’
It is easy to tell how you are doing in life. When you go outside, how beautiful is the flower? That is how you know.
– Brianna Wiest
Waiting for nothing, that is what kills the heart of a man, isn’t it? Now the people are waiting for something.
Gregory David Roberts • Shantaram: A Novel
- I know that environmental influence is the most effective form of behavioral control. Accordingly, if you want radical change, radically change your environment. Being in the wrong city will cancel out years of self-improvement.
Sasha Chapin • 50 Things I Know
“whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal”
On cosmic insignificance:
We are not at the centre of anything, thankfully. We are minuscule bundles of evanescent matter on an infinitesimal corner of a boundless universe. We don't count one bit in the grander scheme ~ that should be a liberation. We should gain relief from the thought of the kindly indifference of spatial infinity, an eternity
... See moreAlready in 1877, Robert Louis Stevenson called busyness a symptom of deficient vitality, and observed a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation.