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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Eric Weiner
Read between
November 2 - November 29, 2020
We scoop trivial pleasures atop a mountain of pain, and wonder why we’re not happy.
I spit upon the pleasures of plush living not for their own account, but because of the discomforts that follow them.”
“Not what we have but what we enjoy constitutes our abundance,”
Rob’s attitude is pure Epicurus. If goodness comes your way, enjoy it. Don’t seek it. Good things come to those who don’t expect good things to come to them. Rob doesn’t expend energy hunting for these baubles. They simply happen at him. When they do, he is grateful.
I would say good enough is good enough. It leaves you time for the more important parts of life. Besides, nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little,”
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
Impatience is a greediness for the future. Patience is a generous attitude toward time.
Attention matters. More than anything else, it shapes our lives. “For the moment, what we attend to is reality,”
The quality of our attention determines the quality of our lives.
attention is. It is taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.”
Don’t pay attention to be more productive, a better worker or parent. Pay attention because it is the morally correct course of action, the right thing to do.
There’s a name for attention at its most intense and generous: love. Attention is love. Love is attention. They are one and the same.
Tyler Hofer liked this
Only when we give someone our attention, fully and with no expectation of reward, are we engaged in this “rarest and purest form of generosity.” This is why the attention denied by a parent or lover stings the most.
Patience is a virtue. It is also good for you, as the latest research shows. Patient people are happier and healthier than impatient ones, studies find. Patient people are more likely to act rationally. They have better coping skills.
All inattention is a form of selfishness. We’ve decided that whatever is happening in our heads is more interesting, more important, than what is happening in the rest of the universe. That’s why narcissists are so inattentive.
A surefire way to increase your fondness for something, anything, is to lose it.
“Real beauty,” he said, “is doing good against evil.” All violence represents a failure of imagination. Nonviolence demands creativity. Gandhi was always searching for new, innovative ways to fight.
Gandhi saw fighting not as a necessary evil but as a necessary good. Provided we fight well.
nonattachment to results. As Lord Krishna, an incarnation of God, tells Arjuna: “You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction.” Sever work from outcome, the Gita teaches. Invest 100 percent effort into every endeavor and precisely zero percent into the results.
He aimed not for Indian independence but for an India worthy of independence. Once this occurred, her freedom would arrive naturally,
Just as you can’t grow a rosebush on toxic soil, you can’t grow a peaceful nation on bloody ground.
How you fight matters more than what you’re fighting about.
A person of ren regularly practices five cardinal virtues: respect, magnanimity, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness.
“Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire,”
The family is our ren gym. It is where we learn to love and be loved. Proximity matters. Start by treating those closest to you kindly, and go from there.
“Every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness,”
Does kindness decrease as you accelerate? Confucius seems to think so. He describes the benevolent person as “simple in manner and slow of speech.”
“The burden is heavy and the road is long,” Confucius said. Kindness is hard. Everything worthwhile is.
Set clear goals and channel all your energies into reaching them,
Small things can kill you. They can also save you.
This is where Stoicism shines. The philosophy’s core teaching—change what you can; accept what you can’t—is
This would become a major theme of Stoicism: in adversity lies strength, and growth.
“No tree becomes rooted and sturdy unless many a wind assails it. For by its very tossing it tightens its grip and plants its roots more securely… disaster is virtue’s opportunity.”
Stoics are not pessimists. They believe everything happens for a reason, the result of a thoroughly rational order.
Not only does the Stoic consider the glass half full; he finds it a miracle he has a glass at all—and isn’t it beautiful?
Too often we place our happiness in the hands of others: a tyrannical boss, a mercurial friend, our Instagram followers. Epictetus, the former slave, likens our predicament to self-imposed bondage.
Imagine, says Epictetus, you handed over your body to a stranger on the street. Absurd, right? Yet that’s what we do with our mind every day. We cede our sovereignty to others, allowing them to colonize our mind.
“Do what you must; let happen what may.”
Only when we realize our reaction to hardship is not automatic but a choice can we begin to make better choices.
By occasionally denying ourselves certain comforts, we appreciate them more, and lessen their hold on us.
Forgoing pleasure is one of life’s greatest pleasures.
The universe follows a script not written by you. And as much as you aspire to one day direct, forget about it. You are an actor.
Stoics saw philosophy as medicine for the soul. Tough medicine. At one point, Epictetus compares the philosopher’s school to the physician’s office, adding that “you shouldn’t leave it in pleasure but in pain.”
“The world’s a pretty big place and I’m not.”
Too often we confuse what is ours and what is not. There’s no need for this confusion, say the Stoics. It’s simple. Nothing is ours, not even our bodies. We always rent, never own. This is liberating. If there is nothing to lose there is nothing to fear losing.
Old age is a large, immovable object, and closer than it appears. Encounters with it are never gentle. You do not brush up against old age. You do not sideswipe old age. You collide with it head-on.
Old age is what her longtime partner, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, called an “unrealizable.” An unrealizable is a state of being we inhabit but never fully internalize; only others do. We may look old, act old, and, by any objective measure, be old, but we never feel old.
many of the deficiencies we blame on old age are really failings of character. Old age does not produce new personality traits so much as it amplifies existing ones. As we age, we become more intensely ourselves.
Philosophy doesn’t teach us what to think but how to think, and we need a new way of thinking about old age.
our projects are forever bumping into other people’s. Our freedom is intertwined with theirs. We are only as free as they are.
