More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“A problem becomes a problem only if you believe it to be so. And often others see you as you see yourself.”
Notes from "The palace of illusions"
Can our actions change our destiny? Or are they like sand piled against the breakage in a dam, merely delaying the inevitable?
Notes from "The palace of illusions"
Expectations are like hidden rocks in your path—all they do is trip you up.
Notes from "The palace of illusions"
In order for a victory to occur, someone had to lose. For one person to gain his desire, many had to give up theirs.
“time will teach you what you refuse to learn from your well-wishers.”
“Can’t you ever be serious?” I said, mortified. “It’s difficult,” he said. “There’s so little in life that’s worth it.”
“A situation in itself,” he said, “is neither happy nor unhappy. It’s only your response to it that causes your sorrow.
Let the past go. Be at ease. Allow the future to arrive at its own pace, unfurling its secrets when it will.
Because ultimately only the witness—and not the actors—knows the truth.”
How little we know our own reputations, I thought with a bitter smile.
Just as we cast off worn clothes and wear new ones, when the time arrives, the soul casts off the body and finds a new one to work out its karma. Therefore the wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead.
The pleasures that arise from sense-objects are bound to end, and thus they are only sources of pain. Don’t get attached to them. And: When a man reaches a state where honor and dishonor are alike to him, then he is considered supreme. Strive to gain such a state.
Perhaps that is the miracle of stories. They make us realize that we’re not alone in our folly and our suffering.
To see a loved one in pain is more wrenching than to bear that pain yourself.
This is the nature of sorrow: often it fades with time, but once in a while it remains lodged below the surface of things, a stubborn thorn beneath a fingernail, making itself felt every time you brush against it.
