Stillness Is the Key Quotes

“And if you’ve had trouble with this in the past? That’s okay. That’s the nice thing about the present. It keeps showing up to give you a second chance.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“This moment we are experiencing right now is a gift (that’s why we call it the present). Even if it is a stressful, trying experience—it could be our last. So let’s develop the ability to be in it, to put everything we have into appreciating the plentitude of the now.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Confidence is the freedom to set your own standards and unshackle yourself from the need to prove yourself.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“If you believe there is ever some point where you will feel like you’ve “made it,” when you’ll finally be good, you are in for an unpleasant surprise. Or worse, a sort of Sisyphean torture where just as that feeling appears to be within reach, the goal is moved just a little bit farther up the mountain and out of reach. 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. If a person can do that, they are richer than any billionaire, more powerful than any sovereign.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“We all demand reparation for our early wounds to our narcissism,” thinking we are owed because we were wronged or deprived.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Confidence is what determines whether this will be a source of anguish or an enjoyable challenge. If you’re miserable every time things are not going your way, if you cannot enjoy it when things are going your way because you undermine it with doubts and insecurity, life will be hell.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“We develop good character, strong epithets for ourselves, so when it counts, we will not flinch.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key: An Ancient Strategy for Modern Life

“Earned. Rational. Objective. Still.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Tolstoy expressed his exasperation at people who didn’t read deeply and regularly. “I cannot understand,” he said, “how some people can live without communicating with the wisest people who ever lived on earth.” There’s another line, now cliché, that is even more cutting: People who don’t read have no advantage over those who cannot read.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“philosophers in the West often trained in wrestling and boxing,”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key: An Ancient Strategy for Modern Life

“Tolstoy observed that love can't exist off in the future. Love is only real if it's happening right now. If you think about it, that's true for basically everything we think, feel, or do.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness Is the Key

“To experience another person fully in the moment is a rare thing. To feel them engage with you, to be giving all their energy to you, as though there is nothing else that matters in the world, is rarer still.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness Is the Key

“Finding the universal in the personal, and the personal in the universal, is not only the secret to art and leadership and even entrepreneurship, it is the secret to centering oneself. It both turns down the volume of noise in the world and tunes one in to the quiet wavelength of wisdom that sages and philosophers have long been on.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Marcus Aurelius pointed out that we don’t need to “get away from it all.” We just need to look within. “Nowhere you can go is more peaceful—more free of interruptions,” he said, “than your own soul.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“That’s the nice thing about the present. It keeps showing up to give you a second chance.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Pick up the phone and make the call to tell someone what they mean to you. Share your wealth. Run for office. Pick up the trash you see on the ground. Step in when someone is being bullied. Step in even if you’re scared, even if you might get hurt. Tell the truth. Maintain your vows, keep your word. Stretch out a hand to someone who has fallen.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Epicurus once said that the wise will accomplish three things in their life: leave written works behind them, be financially prudent and provide for the future, and cherish country living.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“The journey has been enjoyable and well worth making—once!”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Indeed, most desires are at their core irrational emotions, and that’s why stillness requires that we sit down and dissect them. We want to think ahead to the refractory period, to consider the inevitable hangover before we take a drink. When we do that, these desires lose some of their power.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

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

“because you can’t do your best if your mind is elsewhere.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Who is so certain that they’ll get another moment that they can confidently skip over this one?”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“To have blessings and to prize them is to be in Heaven; to have them and not to prize them is to be in Hell. . . . To prize them and not to have them is to be in Hell.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Silence is the general consecration of the universe. —HERMAN MELVILLE”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“read”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key: An Ancient Strategy for Modern Life

“Marcus Aurelius would ask himself, “What am I doing with my soul? Interrogate yourself, to find out what inhabits your so-called mind and what kind of soul you have now. A child’s soul? An adolescent’s? . . . A tyrant’s soul? The soul of a predator—or its prey?”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“As marksmen say these days, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“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

“L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. What’s essential is invisible to the eye.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Just like the overactive voice in a slump, the voice in a streak is an equally deleterious racing mental loop. Both get in the way. Both make a hard thing harder.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key