Stillness Is the Key Quotes

“Confucius wrote that the “gentleman is self-possessed and relaxed, while the petty man is perpetually full of worry.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“To have an impulse and to resist it, to sit with it and examine it, to let it pass by like a bad smell—this is how we develop spiritual strength. This is how we become who we want to be in this world.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Careful as someone crossing an iced-over stream. Alert as a warrior in enemy territory. Courteous as a guest. Fluid as melting ice. Shapable as a block of wood. Receptive as a valley. Clear as a glass of water.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it. —COLIN POWELL”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“We are one big collective organism engaged in one endless project together. We are one.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness Is the Key

“We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“How noble and good everyone could be,” she wrote, “if at the end of the day they were to review their own behavior and weigh up the rights and wrongs. They would automatically try to do better at the start of each new day, and after a while, would certainly accomplish a great deal.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Professor John Stilgoe has simple advice: Get out now. Not just outside, but beyond the trap of the programmed electronic age so gently closing around so many people. . . . Go outside, move deliberately, then relax, slow down, look around. Do not jog. Do not run. . . . Instead pay attention to everything that abuts the rural road, the city street, the suburban boulevard. Walk. Stroll. Saunter. Ride a bike and coast along a lot. Explore.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Build a life you don't need to escape from.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness Is the Key

“Stillness is what aims the archer’s arrow. It inspires new ideas. It sharpens perspective and illuminates connections. It slows the ball down so that we might hit it. It generates a vision, helps us resist the passions of the mob, makes space for gratitude and wonder.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“My aim for this book is for it to be as lean and portable as possible. Since there is limited room here and no desire to leave any valuable source out, anyone who wants a bibliography for this book can email: hello@stillnessisthekey.com For those looking to do more reading on Eastern or Western philosophy, I recommend the following: Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius (Modern Library) Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, by Philip J. Ivanhoe and Bryan W. Van Norden (Hackett) Letters of a Stoic by Seneca (Penguin Classics) The Bhagavad Gita (Penguin Classics) The Art of Happiness, by Epicurus (Penguin Classics) The New Testament: A Translation, by David Bentley Hart (Yale University Press) Buddha, by Karen Armstrong (Penguin Lives Biographies)”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Our job is not to 'go with our gut' or fixate on the first impression we form about an issue. No, we need to be strong enough to resist thinking that is too neat, too plausible, and therefore almost always wrong.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness Is the Key

“But one day, as a much older man, Garry wrote in his diary a formula that might help him overcome that pain and not only heal his own inner child but pass on the lesson to the many surrogate children he had as a mentor and elder in show business.* The formula was simple and is key to breaking the cycle and stilling the deep anguish we carry around with us: Give more. Give what you didn’t get. Love more. Drop the old story. Try it, if you can.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“You can’t run away from your choices—you can only fix them with better choices.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key: An Ancient Strategy for Modern Life

“When you realize there is nothing lacking,” Lao Tzu says, “the whole world belongs to you.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“The need for progress can be the enemy of enjoying the process.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“That’s the answer of a confident person, a person at peace even in difficulty.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Man is a thinking reed,” D. T. Suzuki, one of the early popularizers of Buddhism in the West, once said, “but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. ‘Childlikeness’ has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness. When this is attained, man thinks yet he does not think.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Build a life that you don’t need to escape from.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Get your day scheduled. Limit the interruptions. Limit the number of choices you need to make.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“You will never feel okay by way of external accomplishments. Enough comes from the inside. It comes from stepping off the train. From seeing what you already have, what you’ve always had.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Jesus told his disciples not to worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will take care of itself.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“The less we are convinced of our exceptionalism, the greater ability we have to understand and contribute to our environment, the less blindly driven we are by our own needs, the more clearly we can appreciate the needs of those around us, the more we can appreciate the larger ecosystem of which we are a part. Peace is when we realize that victory and defeat are almost identical spots on one long spectrum. Peace is what allows us to take joy in the success of others and to let them take joy in our own. Peace is what motivates a person to be good, to treat every other living thing well, because they understand that it is a way to treat themselves well. We are one big collective organism engaged in one endless project together. We are one. We are the same. Still, too often we forget it, and we forget ourselves in the process.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Your job, after you have emptied your mind, is to slow down and think. To really think, on a regular basis. . . . Think about what’s important to you. . . . Think about what’s actually going on. . . . Think about what might be hidden from view. . . . Think about what the rest of the chessboard looks like. . . . Think about what the meaning of life really is. The choreographer Twyla Tharp provides an exercise for us to follow: Sit alone in a room and let your thoughts go wherever they will. Do this for one minute. . . . Work up to ten minutes a day of this mindless mental wandering. Then start paying attention to your thoughts to see if a word or goal materializes. If it doesn’t, extend the exercise to eleven minutes, then twelve, then thirteen . . . until you find the length of time you need to ensure that something interesting will come to mind. The Gaelic phrase for this state of mind is “quietness without loneliness.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“What do we want more of in life? That’s the question. It’s not accomplishments. It’s not popularity. It’s moments when we feel like we are enough. More presence. More clarity. More insight. More truth. More stillness.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Yes, we are in motion when we walk, but it is not frenzied motion or even conscious motion—it is repetitive, ritualized motion. It is deliberate. It is an exercise in peace.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“To achieve stillness, we’ll need to focus on three domains, the timeless trinity of mind, body, soul—the head, the heart, the flesh.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“To be steady while the world spins around you. To act without frenzy. To hear only what needs to be heard. To possess quietude—exterior and interior—on command.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Always think about what you'r really being asked to give. Because the answer is often a piece of your life, usually in exchange for something you don't even want. Remember, that's what time is. It's your life, it's your flesh and blood, that you can never get back.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness Is the Key

“What do we want more in life? That's the question. It's not accomplishments. It's not popularity. It's moments when we feel like we are enough. More presence. More clarity. More insight. More truth. More stillness.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness Is the Key