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Accomplishing goals is not success. How much you expand in the process is.
Bad feelings should not always be interpreted as deterrents. They are also indicators that you are doing something frightening and worthwhile.
You think your past defines you, and worse, you think that it is an unchangeable reality, when really, your perception of it changes as you do.
The things you love about others are the things you love about yourself. The things you hate about others are the things you cannot see in yourself.
Your habits create your mood, and your mood is a filter through which you experience your life.
You must learn to let your conscious decisions dictate your day—not your fears or impulses.
Happiness is not how many things you do, but how well you do them.
More is not better. Happiness is not experiencing something else; it’s continually experiencing what you already have in new and different ways.
A lack of routine is just a breeding ground for perpetual procrastination.
They do, however, have the capacity to withhold their emotional response until they are in an environment wherein it would be appropriate to express how they are feeling.
They are kind to all, but truly open to few.
Emotionally intelligent people allow themselves their “bad” days. They let themselves be fully human.
We all start as strangers, but we forget that we rarely choose who ends up a stranger, too.
People who are socially intelligent think and behave in a way that spans beyond what’s culturally acceptable at any given moment in time. They function in such a way that they are able to communicate with others and leave them feeling at ease without sacrificing who they are and what they want to say.
They do not try to elicit a strong emotional response from anyone they are holding a conversation with.
Intelligent people say, “I don’t personally understand this idea or agree with it.” To speak definitively about any one person or idea is to be blind to the multitude of perspectives that exist on it.
Socially intelligent people listen to criticism before they respond to it—an immediate emotional response without thoughtful consideration is just defensiveness.
They focus on communicating something, not just receiving a response from others.
To validate someone else’s feelings is to accept that they feel the way they do without trying to use logic to dismiss or deny or change their minds.
Socially intelligent people know that not everybody wants to communicate, learn, grow or connect—and so they do not try to force them.
The main thing socially intelligent people understand is that your relationship to everyone else is an extension of your relationship to yourself.
You find that you’re seeing issues you struggled with as a kid reappear in your adult life, and while on the surface this may seem like a matter of not having overcome them, it really means you are becoming conscious of why you think and feel so you can change it.
Feeling lost is actually a sign you’re becoming more present in your life—you’re living less within the narratives and ideas that you premeditated and more in the moment at hand.
What you have to know is that suffering is just the refusal to accept what is.
We’re more comforted by ideas of what things are as opposed to what they really are.
You feel miserable some days. This means you’re still open to growth. This means you can be objective and self-aware.
all we really want are a few close people who know us (and love us) no matter what.
You’re not the same person you were a year ago. You’re learning, and evolving, and can identify the ways in which you’ve changed for better and worse.
More important than the fact that you’ve simply had them in the first place is that you or your former partner chose not to settle. You opened yourself to the possibility of something else being out there.
Happiness is not a rush of positive emotion elicited by random events that affirm the way you think something should go. Not sustainable happiness, anyway. The real stuff is the product of an intentional, mindful, daily practice, and it begins with choosing to commit to it.
death gives life meaning.
It’s not about what pain you suffer; it’s about what you suffer for.
The commonality is a sense of purpose, belonging, and love: things you can choose to feel and cultivate, regardless of physical/material circumstance.
Worry is the Western cultural pastime, and it’s ultimately a deflection from the fact that we buoy between extremes: not caring about anything or caring so much about one thing it could break us altogether.
happy people are stigmatized as being clueless and ill-informed and delusionally positive and disconnected from reality, but the only people who perceive them that way are people who do everything in their power to justify the negativity in their lives they feel they cannot control.
It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking rather than think your way into a new way of acting, so do one little thing today and let the momentum build.
The fact that you do not need to be exceptionally beautiful or talented or successful to experience the things that make life profound: love, knowledge, connection, community, and so on.
The people you smiled at on the street this morning, the people whom you text regularly, the family you could stand to visit more—all the little bits of genuine human connection that you overlook because they’ve become givens.
The fact that it is hard to do everything: It’s hard to be in a relationship, it’s hard not to be in one. It’s hard to have to perform at a job you love and are emotionally invested in, it’s hard not to be living your dreams by a certain age. Everything is hard; it’s just a matter of what you think is worth the effort.
What you’d read if you chose books and articles based on what interested you, not what other people say is “good” literature.
The fact that the kind of love worth choosing and keeping is the kind that ever so slightly tilts the axis on which your world spins, leaving nothing to ever be the same again.
If you don’t acknowledge the magnitude of the poor choices you’ve made, you’re bound to justify doing them again; if you live and act as though you can slide by because you’re ever so slightly better than everyone else, you’ll never actually try.
Wanting something badly enough doesn’t qualify you to have it. You cannot be whatever you want, but if you work hard and don’t give up and happen to be born to circumstances that facilitate it, you can maybe do something that crosses your abilities with your interests.
You can control how you treat people, but you cannot actually control what they think.
The point of hard work is to recognize the person it makes you, not what it "gets" you (the former you can control; the latter, you can’t).
Emotional intelligence is the ability to feel, express, and interpret your feelings productively; self-esteem is believing you’re worthy of loving and being loved despite not being supremely, completely “good” all of the time; happiness is a product of how you cope with your problems and whether or not you see them as the opportunities they are.
If you wait on the feeling of “readiness,” you’ll be waiting forever, and worse, you’ll miss the best of what’s in front of you.
If you’re wondering “what you should do with your life,” it’s likely that you’re in the limbo between realizing you don’t want what you once did, and giving yourself permission to want what you want now.
They do not compare themselves to other people, simply because the idea that other people exist in comparison to oneself is mindless at best and selfish at worst.
When people complain, it’s because they want others to recognize and validate their pain; even if it’s not the real problem, it’s still a form of affirmation.
