#inspirational-quotes-book-reviewed — Public Fediverse posts

What nature requires

What nature requires is close by and easy to obtain. All that sweat is for superfluities. We wear out our fine clothes, grow old in army tents, hurl ourselves against foreign shores, and for what? Everything we need is already at hand. Anyone who is on good terms with poverty is rich.

~ Seneca, letter 4:10-11

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Temptation

The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.

~ Oscar Wilde

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Passions

He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason.

~ Cicero

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Rowing

I am rowing toward the past. I am trying to squeeze out of each stroke a better image of myself, and I am trying to enlist the ghosts of history to help power the oars. I want them as friends, as comrades, as partners, as ancestors.

~ Barry Strauss

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In an instant

No one has ever reached a point where the power fortune granted was greater than the risk. The sea is calm now, but do not trust it: The storm comes in an instant. Pleasure boats that were out all morning are sunk before the day is over.

~ Seneca

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Appetite

No man’s body is as strong as his appetites.

~ Tillotson

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Persevere

Persevere in what you have begun; hurry as much as you can, so that you will have more time to enjoy a mind that is settled and made flawless. To be sure, you will have enjoyment even as you make it so; But there is quite another pleasure to be gained from the contemplation of an intellect that is spotlessly pure and right.

~ Seneca

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Benefit

The one way to guarantee we don’t benefit from failure—to ensure it is a bad things—is to not learn from it. To continue to try the same things over and over (which is the definition of insanity for a reason). People fail in small ways all the time. But they don’t learn. They don’t listen. They don’t see the problems that failure exposes. It doesn’t make them better.

~ Ryan Holiday

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The ideal life

The race convinced me of what I had for some time suspected. For me, the ideal life is one that combines body and spirit, one that joins the intensely physical and the intensely intellectual. I would wither away without the exercise of the flesh.

~ Barry Strauss

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Passion

Passion makes us feel, but never see clearly.

~ Bulwer-Lytton

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Tranquility

[Do not disquiet] yourself by running about from place to place. Thrashing around in that way indicates a mind in poor health. In my view, the first sign of a settled mind is that it can stay in one place and spend time with itself.

~ Seneca

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Persistence

Consider this mindset:

never in a hurry
never worried
never desperate
never stopping short

As Epictetus once summarized his entire philosophy: Persist and resist. Persist in your efforts. Resist giving in to distraction, discouragement, or disorder.

~ Ryan Holiday

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Problems

The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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Future

The present moment was once the unimaginable future.

~ Stewart Brand

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First judgements

[R]eject the first judgements and the objections that spring out of them because those objections are so often rooted in fear. […] This is radically different from how we’ve been taught to act. Be realistic, we’re told. Listen to feedback. Play well with others. Compromise. Well, what if the “other” party is wrong? What if conventional wisdom is too conservative? It’s this all-too-common impulse to complain, defer, and then give up that holds us back.

~ Ryan Holiday

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Desperation

People are getting a little desperate. They might not show their best elements to you. You must never lower yourself to being a person you don’t like. There is no better time than now to have a moral and civic backbone. To have a moral and civic true north. This is a tremendous opportunity for you, a young person, to be heroic.

~ Henry Rollins

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Self-conceit

Peole who do not know how to laugh are always pompous and self-conceited.

~ William Makepeace Thackeray

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Petty hazards

Anybody can rise to meet a crisis and face a crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh—I really think that requires spirit.

~ Jean Webster

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Begin. Begin!

Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin!

~ Donald Barthelme

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Language

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.

~ Richard Chenevix Trench

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Theater

The truth is the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theater.

~ David Foster Wallace

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Manual labor of the mind

Writing is essentially donkey work, manual labor of the mind. What makes it bearable are those moments (which sometimes can last for weeks, months) when the book takes over, takes on a life of its own, goes off in unexpected directions.

~ John Gregory Dunne

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New ideas

A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions.

~ Oliver Wendell Berry

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Be a reader

I’m not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world. I’m saying it helps.

~ Walter Mosley

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Premeditation

The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; He who has learnt to die has forgot to serve.

~ Michel de Montaigne

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Boring

Somebody’s boring me—I think it’s me.

~ Dylan Thomas

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The creative mind

The creative mind gets poisoned with the idea that your great work will be the result of getting serious. So many of my good ideas come from what looks like goofing off, wasting time. Art is play. There’s no way to tell what’s deep or shallow until you play with the idea.

~ Austin Kleon

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Who was listening

[…] so the Muse whispered in Beethoven’s ear. Maybe she hummed a few bars into a million other ears. But no one else heard her. Only Beethoven got it.

~ Steven Pressfield

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Sleep

It’s a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

~ John Steinbeck

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A bore

A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you.

~ Bert Taylor

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