ed

Slowing down is a gift.

The pleasures connected with his work were pleasures of ambition; his social pleasures were those of vanity; but Ivan Ilych’s greatest pleasure was playing bridge.

Wei means “doing” or “making,” but also “for a conscious, deliberate purpose.” Wu-wei thus means non-doing, implying effortlessness, non-striving, non-artificiality, non-coercion, but most centrally eschewal of conscious purpose as controller of our actions.

“But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

The ego is a wrong-minded attempt to perceive yourself as you wish to be, rather than as you are. 4 Yet you can know yourself only as you are, because that is all you can be sure of. 5 Everything else is open to question.

Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.

be clear about your intentions.

Part of training your brain to become effective, phenomenal, and powerful, is to have clear filters and standards for what you say “yes” and “no” to.