Stillness Is the Key Quotes

“Different situations naturally call for different virtues and different epithets for the self. When we’re going into a tough assignment, we can say to ourselves over and over again, “Strength and courage.” Before a tough conversation with a significant other: “Patience and kindness.” In times of corruption and evil: “Goodness and honesty.”
The gift of free will is that in this life we can choose to be good or we can choose to be bad. We can choose what standards to hold ourselves to and what we will regard”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness Is the Key

“To the Epicureans real pleasure was about freedom from pain and agitation. If wanting something makes you miserable while you don’t have it, doesn’t that diminish the true value of the reward?”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness Is the Key

“The best insights on enough come to us from the East. “When you realize there is nothing lacking,” Lao Tzu says, “the whole world belongs to you.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness Is the Key

“Joe,” he said, “how does it feel that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel has earned in its entire history?” “I’ve got something he can never have,” Heller replied. “And what on earth could that be?” Vonnegut asked. “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“All of humanity’s problems,” Blaise Pascal said in 1654, “stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” In”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Mill stopped to think, for the first time, about what he was chasing. As he writes: It occurred to me to put the question directly to myself, “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“No one is alone, in suffering or in joy.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Love, Freud said, is the great educator. We learn when we give it. We learn when we get it. We get closer to stillness through it.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“There is no stillness to the mind that thinks of nothing but itself, nor will there ever be peace for the body and spirit that follow their every urge and value nothing but themselves.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Not that all beauty is so immediately beautiful. We’re not always on the farm or at the beach or gazing out over sweeping canyon views. Which is why the philosopher must cultivate the poet’s eye—the ability to see beauty everywhere, even in the banal or the terrible.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Killing ourselves does nothing for anybody.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“More does nothing for the one who feels less than, who cannot see the wealth that was given to them at birth, that they have accumulated in their relationships and experiences.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Temperance. That’s the key. Intellectually, we know this. It’s only in flashes of insight or tragedy that we feel it.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Thomas Traherne: “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

“Most people never learn that their accomplishments will ultimately fail to provide the relief and happiness we tell ourselves they will.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“enough is a beautiful thing.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“He came up with a good test anytime he felt himself being pulled by a strong desire: What will happen to me if I get what I want? How will I feel after?”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Lust is a destroyer of peace in our lives: Lust for a beautiful person. Lust for an orgasm. Lust for someone other than the one we’ve committed to be with. Lust for power. Lust for dominance. Lust for other people’s stuff. Lust for the fanciest, best, most expensive things that money can buy.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Every man has a passion gnawing away at the bottom of his heart, just as every fruit has its worm. —ALEXANDRE DUMAS”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Each of us must break the link in the chain of what the Buddhists call samsara, the continuation of life’s suffering from generation to generation.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“The Daodejing, for instance, actually translates as The Way of Virtue.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“The premise of this book is that our three domains—the mind, the heart, and the body—must be in harmony.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“The mind tends toward stillness,” Lao Tzu said, “but is opposed by craving.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Everyone tries to shoot naturally,” Kenzo wrote, “but nearly all practitioners have some kind of strategy, some kind of shallow, artificial, calculating technical trick that they rely on when they shoot. Technical tricks ultimately lead nowhere.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“This is also confidence. Which needs neither congratulations nor glory in which to revel, because it is an honest understanding of our strengths and weakness that reveals the path to a greater glory: inner peace and a clear mind.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“There is perhaps no one less at peace than the egomaniac, their mind a swirling miasma of their own grandiosity and insecurity”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“We want to sit with doubt. We want to savor it. We want to follow it where it leads. Because on the other side is truth.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Xunzi was more explicit: “Learning must never cease. . . . The noble person who studies widely and examines himself each day will become clear in his knowing and faultless in his conduct.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“All profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence. . . . Silence is the general consecration of the universe. —HERMAN MELVILLE”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Trust no future, howe’er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act,—act in the living present! Heart within, and God o’erhead! —HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key