Stillness Is the Key Quotes

“Whatever you face, whatever you're doing will require first and foremost, that you don't defeat yourself. That you don't make it harder by overthinking, by needless doubts, or by second-guessing.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness Is the Key

“It was Cicero who said that to study philosophy is to learn how to die.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Work is what horses die of. Everybody should know that. —ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“For property is poverty and fear; only to have possessed something and to have let go of it means carefree ownership. —RAINER MARIA RILKE”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“You are born free - free of stuff, free of burden. But since the first time they measured your tiny body for clothes, people have been foisting stuff upon you. And you've been adding links to the pule of chains yourself ever since.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness Is the Key

“It's a pushing age," Churchill wrote his mother as a young man, "and we must shove with the rest." It may well be that Winston Churchill was the greatest pusher in history. His life spanned the final calvary charge of the British Empire, which he witnesses as a young war correspondent in 1898, and ended well into the nuclear age, indeed the space age, both of which he helped usher in. His first trip to America was on a steamship (to be introduces on stage by Mark Twain, no less) and his final one was on a Boeing 707 that flew 500 miles per hour. In between he saw two world wars, the invention of the car, radio, and rock and roll, and countless trials and triumphs.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness Is the Key

“As a general, Napoleon made it his habit to delay responding to the mail. His secretary was instructed to wait three weeks before opening any correspondence. When he finally did hear what was in a letter, Napoleon loved to note how many supposedly “important” issues had simply resolved themselves and no longer required a reply. While Napoleon”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“This moment we are experiencing right now is a gift (that's why we call it the present).”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness Is the Key

“The truth is that a good routine is not only a source of great comfort and stability, it’s the platform from which stimulating and fulfilling work is possible.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“When most of us hear the word “leisure,” we think of lounging around and doing nothing. In fact, this is a perversion of a sacred notion. In Greek, “leisure” is rendered as scholé—that is, school. Leisure historically meant simply freedom from the work needed to survive, freedom for intellectual or creative pursuits. It was learning and study and the pursuit of higher things.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“No one achieves excellence or enlightenment without a desire to get better, without a tendency to explore potential areas of improvement. Yet the desire—or the need—for more is often at odds with happiness. Billie Jean King, the tennis great, has spoken about this, about how the mentality that gets an athlete to the top so often prevents them from enjoying the thing they worked so hard for. The need for progress can be the enemy of enjoying the process.”
― 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. Because if the leader can’t take the time to develop a clear sense of the bigger picture, who will? If the leader isn’t thinking through all the way to the end, who is?”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“The best car is not the one that turns the most heads, but the one you have to worry about the least. The best clothes are the ones that are the most comfortable, that require you to spend the least amount of time shopping—regardless of what the magazines say. The best house for you is the one that feels the most like home. Don’t use your money to purchase loneliness, or headaches, or status anxiety.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Good decisions are not made by those who are running on empty. What kind of interior life can you have, what kind of thinking can you do, when you’re utterly and completely overworked? It’s a vicious cycle: We end up having to work more to fix the errors we made when we would have been better off resting, having consciously said no instead of reflexively saying yes. We end up pushing good people away (and losing relationships) because we’re wound so tight and have so little patience.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“The Japanese have a concept, shinrin yoku—forest bathing—which is a form of therapy that uses nature as a treatment for mental and spiritual issues.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“To become empty is to become one with the divine—this is the Way. —AWA KENZO”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“baking bread splits in places and those cracks, while not intended in the baker’s art, catch our eye and serve to stir our appetite,” or the “charm and allure” of nature’s process, the “stalks of ripe grain bending low, the frowning brow of the lion, the foam dripping from the boar’s mouth.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita calls desire the “ever-present enemy of the wise . . . which like a fire cannot find satisfaction.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“As Thich Nhat Hanh has written: After recognizing and embracing our inner child, the third function of mindfulness is to soothe and relieve our difficult emotions. Just by holding this child gently, we are soothing our difficult emotions and we can begin to feel at ease. When we embrace our strong emotions with mindfulness and concentration, we’ll be able to see the roots of these mental formations. We’ll know where our suffering has come from. When we see the roots of things, our suffering will lessen. So mindfulness recognizes, embraces, and relieves.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Each of us must cultivate a moral code, a higher standard that we love almost more than life itself.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“We cannot be in harmony with anyone or anything if the need for more, more, more is gnawing at our insides like a maggot.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“On the surface of the ocean there is stillness,” the monk Thich Nhat Hanh has said of the human condition, “but underneath there are currents.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“We try, in the words of Marcus Aurelius, to “shrug it all off and wipe it clean—every annoyance and distraction—and reach utter stillness.” To build a kind of mental vault or stronghold that no distraction or false impression can breach.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Stillness, then, is actually a way to superior performance. Looseness will give you more control than gripping tightly—to a method or a specific outcome.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“That is what journaling is about. It’s spiritual windshield wipers, as the writer Julia Cameron once put it.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Dorothy Day, the Catholic nun and social activist, admonished herself much the same. “Turn off your radio,” she wrote, “put away your daily paper. Read one review of events and spend time reading.” Books, spend time reading books—that’s what she meant. Books full of wisdom.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. —HERBERT SIMON”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Will we fall short of our own standards? Yes. When this happens, we don’t need to whip ourselves, as Clamence did, we must simply let it instruct and teach us, as all injuries do.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“There’s nothing to feel guilty about for being idle. It’s not reckless. It’s an investment. There is nourishment in pursuits that have no purpose—that is their purpose.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key