“Nobody knows enough to
be pessimistic.”
~ Daniel Goleman, “A
Force for Good: The Dalai Lama's Vision for Our World”
“The end and means are one. If the means
didn’t contribute to the human happiness neither will the end. The end result
will carry the energy of what it took to get there.”
“You never experience
the future as the future, you always experience it as the now. The future is no
more than the extension of now.”
“What you do isn’t that
important. How you do what you do is most important.”
“Whatever you identify
with is your ego.”
“Whatever you experience
repeatedly externally reflects your inner life”
“Whenever you feel
inferior or superior to anyone that’s your ego at play”
~ Eckhart
Tolle, from his books and conversations with Oprah on SuperSoul Sundays
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"May all your weeds
be wildflowers."
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“There is my business. There is other people’s
business. And there is God’s business.”
~ Byron Katie with Oprah
on SuperSoul Sunday show and podcast.
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“The audacity of hope of rooted things.”
~ Cynthia Bond, “Ruby”
“Rational optimism” “Happiness is the joy you
feel moving towards your full potential.”
~From a live appearance
at UCLA’s Royce Hall, New York Times best-selling author, happiness expert and
Harvard-trained researcher Shawn Achor says that pleasure isn't the only thing
that brings people happiness.
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Three happy lives
- The Pleasant life
- The Good life (pleasure vs flow)
- The Meaningful life - use your life in the service of something larger than you are
~ MartinSeligman, psychologist
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“Sometimes you need to
be beaten up to be tender enough to feel.”
~ David
Brooks, in a conversation with Oprah on the SuperSoul Sunday show /
podcast
**************
“Self-control is the ability to align your
behavior with what you want.“
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“The mob is where people
go to take a break from their conscience”
~ Jeff Daniels on
Broadway, playing Atticus Finch in the heart-wrenchingly poignant and timely
“To Kill a Mockingbird”
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“Power doesn’t necessarily corrupt. Power
reveals. The way people use power shows their pre-existing values.”
~Adam Grant, Podcast, Understanding Humans in the Wild
**************
“Comfort can be
dangerous. It provides the floor but also a ceiling.”
“In our society we do
horrible things to one another because we don’t see the people it effects, we
don’t see their faces. We don’t see them as people.”
“Traditional man wants a
woman to be subservient. But he never falls in love with subservient women. He
is attracted to independent women. He is like an exotic bird collector. He only
wants a woman who is free because his dream is to only put her in the cage.”
“Then I realized that
the police weren’t who they said they were. They were men first, police
second.”
“Relationships are not
sustained by violence but by love. Love is a creative act. When you love
someone you create a new world for them.”
“Growing up in home of
abuse, you struggle with the notion that you can love a person you hate or hate
a person you love. It’s a strange feeling. You want to live in the world where
someone is good or bad. Where you either hate them or love them. But that’s not
how people are. “
About the beatings “they
were sporadic enough so you would think they won’t happen again but frequent
enough so you had never forgotten that they were possible.”
~ Trevor Noah, “Born a
Crime”
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“Kids know at the very
young age when they’re being devalued. When adults aren’t invested in after
helping them learn. Their anger over it can manifest itself as Unruliness. It’s
hardly their fault. They aren’t bad kids they’re just trying to survive bad
circumstances.”
“My grandfather lived
with a bitter residue of his own dashed dreams.”
“The need to situate
someone in his or her ethnicity and the frustration that comes that it can’t
easily be done.”
“A safe harbor of female
wisdom.”
“Failure is a feeling
long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with
self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear.”
About her mom: “Advice
when she offered it was of the hard boiled and pragmatic variety.”
“Every move she made I
realize now was buttressed by the quiet confidence that she raised us to be
adults.” (About her mom’s parenting)
“I understand now that
even a happy marriage can be a vexation, it is a contract that needs to be
renewed again and again. Even quietly and privately. Even alone.”
About Barack Obama “He
steered himself with certainty which I found to be astounding.”
“I craved permanence..[...]
I wanted to grab every last thing I loved and stake it ruthlessly to the
ground.”
“It hurts to live after
someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down the hallway or open a
fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks or brush your teeth. Food tastes
like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts and so do memories. You look at
something you’d otherwise would find beautiful. A purple sky at sunset. Or
playgrounds full of kids. And it only somehow deepens the loss.”
“’Almost home’ was not a
geo-locator but a state of mind”
About her daughters “I
didn’t want them ever to believe that life began when the man of the house
arrived home.”
Speaking about her
career as a woman “You’ve got to be twice is good to get half as far.”
Friendships between
women as any woman would tell are built of a thousand small kindnesses [...]
swapped back and forth and over again.
~ Michelle Obama, “Becoming”
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There is a correlation
between incompetence and a sense of self confidence
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“Stop pushing against
what is.”
~ Oprah
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“I really need for people to take responsibility for the kind of energy they bring to me.”
“I really need for people to take responsibility for the kind of energy they bring to me.”
— Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor,
a Harvard-trained brain scientist, describes how a massive stroke gave her a
second chance at life. “My stroke of insight”
**************
“Things change when you
change.”
~Eckhart
Tolle
**************
“Your world has never stopped changing, and it
never will. As you read this, everything you know and everything you are is
dropping away, and away, and away, into the irretrievable past. Sometimes it’s
fairly easy to ignore that, of course. You create a career, a relationship, a
child, and you tell yourself things are as they should be, forever. It’s a
lovely fantasy while it lasts, and it can be hard to let go when the illusion
of stability inevitably ends.”
~ Martha Beck (author of
“Finding your own North Star” and “The Joy Diet” and many others.)
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“Life will give you
whatever experiences which is most helpful for the evolution of your
conscienceless. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this
is the experience you are having at this moment."
"The ego wants to want
more than that wants to have. And the shallow satisfaction of having is always
replaced by more wanting."
"The past can not stop
you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that.
What is a grievance? A baggage of old thought and emotion."
"There is nothing that
strengthens the ego than being right. For you to be right, of course, you need
for someone else to be wrong."
"Anything you resent and
strongly react to in another is also in you."
“'I am ruined' is a
story. 'I have 50 cents in my bank account' is a fact. Facing facts is always
empowering."
"Awareness is the
greatest agent for change."
"Mastery of life is not a
question of control. But about finding the balance between human and being."
~ Eckhart
Tolle, "The New Earth"
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“Maturity is the ability
to live fully and equally in multiple contexts”
~ Poet and philosopher David
Whyte
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"There’s no such thing as
lack of adversity. It doesn’t exist. As the old saying goes 'wherever
you go there you are.' Same is true for adversity and failure. No matter where
you go there’s a 500 pound load of sh-t waiting for you. That’s perfectly fine. The
point isn’t getting away from the sh-t. The point is to find the sh-t you enjoy
doing."
"Responsibility and fault
are not the same thing. Fault is past tense. Responsibility is future tense."
"If it feels like it’s
you versus the world, chances are it’s just you versus yourself."
~ Mark Mason, "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F-ck"
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Manson's Law of Avoidance
The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid doing it. For example, the prospect of becoming a well known artist nobody likes is far scarier than an artist no one has heard about.
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“When I die, I want
people to remember how my love affected them. Not how many shows I did.”
~ Oprah
“Our mind might be the
most brilliant piece of machinery in the Universe. But it requires adult
supervision. This means we have to assert what are the right things for us to
do or not do. We have to battle thoughts that are un-useful or harmful or
damaging to us.”
