on life
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
Already 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.
Jenny Odell • How to Do Nothing
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’
Your job, really, is to find people who love you for reasons you hardly understand, and to love them back, and to try as hard as you can to make it all easier for each other."
‘Make no effort to join society. Stay right where you are and wait for society to form around you. Because it most certainly will.’
Jo Tinsley • The Odditorium
To feel creatively and intellectually alive, you have to stop mindlessly consuming the Internet and start mindfully curating it.
Generous people view their possessions as temporary; they are joining in a bigger story. Generous people are always looking toward the needs of others by using what they have been given. Things don’t matter; people do. They open their house to others. They open their pool for parties. They let people borrow their cars. They freely give, with no
... See moreJeff Shinabarger • More or Less: Choosing a Lifestyle of Excessive Generosity
My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.
– Michael J. Fox
... See more“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To