Cassidy > Cassidy's Quotes

“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“What mindfulness does is create some space in your head so you can, as the Buddhists say, “respond” rather than simply “react.” In the Buddhist view, you can’t control what comes up in your head; it all arises out of a mysterious void. We spend a lot of time judging ourselves harshly for feelings that we had no role in summoning. The only thing you can control is how you handle it.”
― Dan Harris, 10% Happier

“Picture the mind like a waterfall, they said: the water is the torrent of thoughts and emotions; mindfulness is the space behind the waterfall. Again, elegant theory – but, easier said than done.”
― Dan Harris, 10% Happier

“May you be happy. May you be safe and protected from harm. May you be healthy and strong. May you live with ease.”
― Dan Harris, 10% Happier

“We live so much of our lives pushed forward by these “if only” thoughts, and yet the itch remains. The pursuit of happiness becomes the source of our unhappiness.”
― Dan Harris, 10% Happier

“Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It’s about feeling the way you feel.”
― Dan Harris, 10% Happier

“Mindfulness, happiness, and not being a jerk are skills I can hone the rest of my life—every day, every moment, until senility or death. And the payoff is less reactivity, less rumination, and—who knows?—maybe stream-entry. I have willingness and curiosity. I have confidence and trust. I guess another word I could use is . . . faith.”
― Dan Harris, 10% Happier

“If you’re never looking up, I now realized, you’re always just looking around.”
― Dan Harris, 10% Happier

“Marturano recommended something radical: do only one thing at a time. When you’re on the phone, be on the phone. When you’re in a meeting, be there. Set aside an hour to check your email, and then shut off your computer monitor and focus on the task at hand. Another tip: take short mindfulness breaks throughout the day. She called them “purposeful pauses.” So, for example, instead of fidgeting or tapping your fingers while your computer boots up, try to watch your breath for a few minutes. When driving, turn off the radio and feel your hands on the wheel. Or when walking between meetings, leave your phone in your pocket and just notice the sensations of your legs moving. “If I’m a corporate samurai,” I said, “I’d be a little worried about taking all these pauses that you recommend because I’d be thinking, ‘Well, my rivals aren’t pausing. They’re working all the time.’ ” “Yeah, but that assumes that those pauses aren’t helping you. Those pauses are the ways to make you a more clear thinker and for you to be more focused on what’s important.”
― Dan Harris, 10% Happier

“Yale Law School was like nerd Hollywood, and I never stopped feeling like an awestruck tourist.”
― J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

“The risk inherent in climbing such mountains carries its own reward, deep and abiding, because it provides as profound a sense of self-knowledge as anything else on earth. A mountain is perilous, true; but it is also redemptive. Maybe I had dimly understood this when, as a rootless boy, with no earthly place to call my own, I deliberately chose the iconoclast's rocky path of mountain climbing. But in this moment of pure clarity I realized that ascending Everest had been, for me, both a personal declaration of liberty and a defiant act of escape. Now, suddenly, I felt an inexpressible serenity, a full-blooded reaffirmation of life, on Everest's icy ridges. At last, I was ready to descend the mountain and go home.”
― David Breashears, High Exposure: An Enduring Passion for Everest and Unforgiving Places

“Juniper looks at her--this little old woman with a powdered wig and a big office on the fancy side of town---and understands perfectly well. She understands that the Women's Association wants one kind of power--the kind you can wear in public or argue in a courtroom or write on a slip of paper and drop in a ballot box--and that Juniper wants another. The kind that cuts, the kind with sharp teeth and talons, the kind that starts fires and dances merry around the blaze.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Once and Future Witches

“She thought survival was a selfish thing, a circle drawn tight around your heart. She thought the more people you let inside that circle the more ways the world had to hurt you, the more ways you could fail them and be failed in turn. But what if it’s the opposite, and there are more people to catch you when you fall? What if there’s an invisible tipping point somewhere along the way when one becomes three becomes infinite, when there are so many of you inside that circle that you become hydra-headed, invincible?”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Once and Future Witches

“she thinks of the ways people make for themselves when there are none, the impossible things they render possible.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Once and Future Witches

“Agnes isn’t surprised, not really. She knows powerful men only keep their promises when they have to, and they never have to. But she’s surprised how angry it makes her.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Once and Future Witches

“Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice. One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“The only thing that can save us from our irascibly self-centered existence is to make sure that our existence is in the service of others”
― Mark Shrime, Solving for Why: A Surgeon's Journey to Discover the Transformative Power of Purpose

“Purpose, meaning, and contentment exist when why is at the center, and when we construct our paths to lead to it. Not the other way around.”
― Mark Shrime, Solving for Why: A Surgeon's Journey to Discover the Transformative Power of Purpose

“Focus on the why, even if the why gives you results that go against everything you’d hoped to accomplish.”
― Mark Shrime, Solving for Why: A Surgeon's Journey to Discover the Transformative Power of Purpose

“His why—to restore to his patients their fundamental right to a seat at the table of humanity—bleeds into everyone he meets.”
― Mark Shrime, Solving for Why: A Surgeon's Journey to Discover the Transformative Power of Purpose

“Work provides us three things: a means of survival, a source of self-determination, and a connection with others. What it doesn't provide is a why. Work is a path, not purpose.”
― Mark Shrime, Solving for Why: A Surgeon's Journey to Discover the Transformative Power of Purpose

“In the thin places, we see that our perceptions of reality, of God, and of our lives are not divine mandates. We see that there's more than just the path we're on.”
― Mark Shrime, Solving for Why: A Surgeon's Journey to Discover the Transformative Power of Purpose

“Turning our hearts toward the poor, then, can't just mean dealing with pecuniary poverty. It can't just mean a monthly donation. It has to mean diving in, walking alongside, breaking down the hegemony, and fighting the ethos of the Other, wherever we find it. It must mean taking a serious look at our own role in perpetuating the structural inequities Dr. Farmer describes.”
― Mark Shrime, Solving for Why: A Surgeon's Journey to Discover the Transformative Power of Purpose

“I've learned to fall in love with failure not because failure is pleasant, but because it is beautiful. Failure tells me I tried something I don't yet know how to do. It indicates I'm moving. And it shows me that I'm no longer on the anodyne path.”
― Mark Shrime, Solving for Why: A Surgeon's Journey to Discover the Transformative Power of Purpose

“Solving for why hasn't made life any less routine. The difference, however, is obvious: routine was once the anesthetic I used to numb myself to the moving sidewalk. Now, it is the how with which I live out my why.”
― Mark Shrime, Solving for Why: A Surgeon's Journey to Discover the Transformative Power of Purpose

“This is the church of the outcast, the shunned, the spurned, the Other. This is the congregation of the sideshow. This is my people. This is worship.”
― Mark Shrime, Solving for Why: A Surgeon's Journey to Discover the Transformative Power of Purpose