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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The best car is not the one that turns the most heads, but the one you have to worry about the least.
The memory is what’s important. The experience itself is what matters. You can access that anytime you want, and no thief can ever deprive you of it.
people say they don’t have room for a relationship in their life . . . and they’re right. Their stuff is taking up too much space. They’re in love with possessions instead of people.
A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness and that to seek it is perversion.
It’s difficult to understand yourself if you are never by yourself.
If solitude is the school of genius,
then the crowded, busy world is the purgatory of the idiot.
In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro—“Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.”
“solitude without purpose” is a killer of creativity.)
Work is what horses die of. Everybody should know that.
any positive trait—even hard work—taken to excess becomes a vice.
Is that what you want to be? A workhorse that draws its load until it collapses and dies, still shod and in the harness? Is that what you were put on this planet for?
this is the distinction between confidence and ego. Can you trust yourself and your abilities enough to keep something in reserve? Can you protect the stillness and the inner peace necessary to win the longer race of life?
“it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer.” Work will not set you free. It will kill you if you’re not careful.
It’s human being, not human doing, for a reason. Moderation. Being present. Knowing your limits. This is the key. The body that each of us has was a gift. Don’t work it to death. Don’t burn it out. Protect the gift.
There is a time for many words and there is a time for sleep. —HOMER, THE ODYSSEY
The overworked person creates a crisis that they try to solve by working harder.
“sleep is the source of all health and energy.”
It was learning and study and the pursuit of higher things.
“the ability to be ‘at leisure’ is one of the basic powers of the human soul.”
It’s meditative to put the body in motion and direct our mental efforts at conquering our physical limitations.
“If an action tires your body but puts your heart at ease,” Xunzi said, “do it.”
Our bodies are busy, but our minds are open. Our hearts too.
the humility of being bad at something because we are a beginner, but having the confidence to trust in the process.
We must be disciplined about our discipline and moderate in our moderation.
There is nourishment in pursuits that have no purpose—that is their purpose.
Despair and restlessness go together. The problem is that you can’t flee despair. You can’t escape, with your body, problems that exist in your mind and soul.
When you defer and delay, interest is accumulating. The bill still comes due . . . and it will be even harder to afford then than it will be right now.
Those who think they will find solutions to all their problems by traveling far from home,
are bringing ruins to ruins. Wherever they go, whatever they do, their sad self comes along.
That can’t happen if you’re jetting off from one place to another, if you’re packing your schedule with every activity you can think of in order to avoid the possibility of having to spend even a moment alone with your own thoughts.
Stillness is not an excuse to withdraw from the affairs of the world. Quite the opposite—it’s
eudaimonia: human flourishing.
Tell the truth. Maintain your vows, keep your word. Stretch out a hand to someone who has fallen.
If we want to be good and feel good, we have to do good.
As a well-spent day brings a happy sleep, so a well-employed life brings a happy death. —LEONARDO DA VINCI
aequanimitas.
“All individual things pass away,” he said. “Seek your liberation with diligence.”
the end the same. Clear. Calm. Kind. Still.
The mind. The soul. The body. The mental. The spiritual. The physical.
A light loses nothing by being extinguished, he said, it just goes back to how it was before.
It was Cicero who said that to study philosophy is to learn how to die.
We must learn to think rationally and clearly about our own fate. We must find spiritual meaning and goodness while we are alive. We must treat the vessel we inhabit on this planet well—or we will be forced to abandon it early.
Chop wood, carry water. Fix fences, load hay, seize the bull. My mind is empty. My heart is full. My body is busy. Attamen tranquillus.
