More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.”
Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.
Why are we embarrassed by silence? What comfort do we find in all the noise?
How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity. Just a few tearful minutes, then on with the day.
Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too—even when you’re in the dark. Even when you’re falling.”
“Everyone knows they’re going to die,” he said again, “but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently.”
“once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”
If you’re always battling against getting older, you’re always going to be unhappy, because it will happen anyhow.
“How can I be envious of where you are—when I’ve been there myself?”
“We put our values in the wrong things. And it leads to very disillusioned lives.
“Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.
“People are only mean when they’re threatened,” he said later that day, “and that’s what our culture does. That’s what our economy does. Even people who have jobs in our economy are threatened, because they worry about losing them. And when you get threatened, you start looking out only for yourself. You start making money a god. It is all part of this culture.”
The little things, I can obey. But the big things—how we think, what we value—those you must choose yourself.
“Don’t let go too soon, but don’t hang on too long.”
“It’s natural to die,” he said again. “The fact that we make such a big hullabaloo over it is all because we don’t see ourselves as part of nature. We think because we’re human we’re something above nature.”
