Stillness is the Key

by Ryan Holiday

A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness and that to seek it is perversion. —JOHN GRAVES

If solitude is the school of genius, as the historian Edward Gibbon put it, then the crowded, busy world is the purgatory of the idiot.

Work is what horses die of. Everybody should know that. —ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN

In the fourth century BC, Mengzi spoke of how the Way is near, but people seek it in what is distant. A few generations after that, Marcus Aurelius pointed out that we don’t need to “get away from it all.” We just need to look within. “Nowhere you can go is more peaceful—more free of interruptions,” he said, “than your own soul.”

Build a life that you don’t need to escape from.

To see people who will notice a need in the world and do something about it. . . . Those are my heroes. —FRED ROGERS

In Camus’s final novel, The Fall, his narrator, Clamence, is walking alone on a street in Amsterdam when he hears what sounds like a woman falling into the water. He’s not totally certain that’s what he heard, but mostly, riding the high of a nice evening with his mistress, he does not want to be bothered, and so he continues on. A respected lawyer with a reputation as a person of great virtue in his community, Clamence returns to his normal life the following day and attempts to forget the sound he heard. He continues to represent clients and entertain his friends with persuasive political arguments, as he always has. Yet he begins to feel off. One day, after a triumphant appearance in court arguing for a blind client, Clamence gets the feeling he is being mocked and laughed at by a group of strangers he can’t quite locate. Later, approaching a stalled motorist at an intersection, he is unexpectedly insulted and then assaulted. These encounters are unrelated, but they contribute to a weakening of the illusions he has long held about himself. It is not with an epiphany or from a blow to the head that the monstrous truth of what he has done becomes clear. It is a slow, creeping realization that comes to Clamence that suddenly and irrevocably changes his self-perception: That night on the canal he shrugged off a chance to save someone from committing suicide. This realization is Clamence’s undoing and the central focus of the book. Forced to see the hollowness of his pretens...

Virtue is not an abstract notion. We are not clearing our minds and separating the essential from the inessential for the purposes of a parlor trick. Nor are we improving ourselves so that we can get richer or more powerful. We are doing it to live better and be better. Every person we meet and every situation we find ourselves in is an opportunity to prove that.

If you see fraud, and do not say fraud, the philosopher Nassim Taleb has said, you are a fraud. Worse, you will feel like a fraud. And you will never feel proud or happy or confident.

If we want to be good and feel good, we have to do good. There is no escaping this. Dive in when you hear the cry for help. Reach out when you see the need. Do kindness where you can. Because you’ll have to find a way to live with yourself if you don’t.

As a well-spent day brings a happy sleep, so a well-employed life brings a happy death. —LEONARDO DA VINCI

Seneca reminded himself that before we were born we were still and at peace, and so we will be once again after we die. A light loses nothing by being extinguished, he said, it just goes back to how it was before.