Travis > Travis's Quotes

“On his thirty-first birthday, Lewis wrote, in a famous passage, “This day I completed my thirty first year. . . . I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the hapiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended.” He resolved: “In future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.”5”
― Stephen E. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West

“There is a difference between a belief and a conviction. A belief can become something you merely hold; a conviction is that which holds you.”
― Ravi Zacharias, Seeing Jesus from the East: A Fresh Look at History’s Most Influential Figure

“Opening the household table on a regular basis creates an undercurrent of the Christian life that mimics the adoption ethic.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“Sherry Turkle describes the way texting and online chatting have threatened true friendship because they allow us to plan and curate the versions of ourselves that we bring to our discussions. When we’re removed from facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice, and when we have time to consider and edit our replies, we don’t face the risk that face-to-face conversation naturally brings. So we don’t risk being known as someone less than perfect.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“the ever-outraged and always-offended tone of mainstream news sources is making us numb to the world’s pain. When everything is a crisis, nothing is.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“how normal it has become to feel as though you absolutely must do more than you can do.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“You’ve got to release the world; you’ve got to release people, crises, trauma, intrigue, all of it. There has to be sometime in your day where you just let it all go. All the tragedy of the world, the heartbreak, the latest shooting, earthquake—the soul was never meant to endure this. The soul was never meant to inhabit a world like this. It’s way too much. Your soul is finite. You cannot carry the sorrows of the world. Only God can do that. Only he is infinite. Somewhere, sometime in your day, you’ve just got to release it. You’ve got to let it go. .”
― John Eldredge, Resilient: Restoring Your Weary Soul in These Turbulent Times

“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but it turns out to be hard, partly because it’s hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs. . . . Most of the work I’ve done in the last ten years didn’t exist when I was in high school. . . . In such a world it’s not a good idea to have fixed plans. And yet every May, speakers all over the country fire up the Standard Graduation Speech, the theme of which is: don’t give up on your dreams. I know what they mean, but this is a bad way to put it, because it implies you’re supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on. The computer world has a name for this: premature optimization. . . . . . . Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway. In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don’t commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World