Stillness Is the Key Quotes

“The morning before the rest of the house wakes up. Or late in the evening after the world has gone to sleep. Grab these moments. Schedule them. Cultivate them.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“If a person puts even one measure of effort into following ritual and the standards of righteousness, he will get back twice as much. —XUNZI”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Rise above our physical limitations. Find hobbies that rest and replenish us. Develop a reliable, disciplined routine. Spend time getting active outdoors. Seek out solitude and perspective. Learn to sit—to do nothing when called for. Get enough sleep and rein in our workaholism. Commit to causes bigger than ourselves.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Sir, to what do you attribute your success in life?” Immediately, Churchill replied, “Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“The truly philosophical view is that not only is originality necessary, but everyone is necessary. Even the people you don’t like. Even the ones who really piss you off. Even the people wasting their lives, cheating, or breaking the rules are part of the larger equation. We can appreciate—or at least sympathize with—them, rather than try to fight or change them.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Knowing what not to think about. What to ignore and not to do. It’s your first and most important job.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Wisdom does not immediately produce stillness or clarity. Quite the contrary. It might even make things less clear—make them darker before the dawn.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“He was constantly probing other people’s views. Why do you think that? How do you know? What evidence do you have? But what about this or that? This open-minded search for truth, for wisdom, was what made Socrates the most brilliant and challenging man in Athens—so much so that they later killed him for it.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Paper,” she said, “has more patience than people.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“We pay thousands of dollars to have a device in our pocket to ensure that we are never bored. We sign up for endless activities and obligations, chase money and accomplishments, all with the naïve belief that at the end of it will be happiness.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“during a quiet evening at home, all we’re thinking about is the list of improvements that need to be made. There may be a beautiful sunset, but instead of taking it in, we’re taking a picture of it.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“People say, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” as they hasten that very death, both literally and figuratively. They trade their health for a few more working hours. They trade the long-term viability of their business or their career before the urgency of some temporal crisis.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“We do not live in this moment. We, in fact, try desperately to get out of it—by thinking, doing, talking, worrying, remembering, hoping, whatever. We pay thousands of dollars to have a device in our pocket to ensure that we are never bored. We sign up for endless activities and obligations, chase money and accomplishments, all with the naïve belief that at the end of it will be happiness.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“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

“To see people who will notice a need in the world and do something about it. . . . Those are my heroes. —FRED ROGERS”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“John Boyd, a sort of warrior-monk who revolutionized Western military strategy in the latter half of the twentieth century, refused to take checks from defense contractors and deliberately lived in a small condo even as he advised presidents and generals. “If a man can reduce his needs to zero,” he said, “he is truly free: there is nothing that can be taken from him and nothing anyone can do to hurt him.”
― 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.” The verse in The Daodejing: The greatest misfortune is to not know contentment. The word calamity is the desire to acquire. And so those who know the contentment of contentment are always content.”
― 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. They constantly bite off more than they can chew. They pick fights everywhere they go. They create enemies. They are incapable of learning from their mistakes (because they don’t believe they make any). Everything with them is complicated, everything is about them.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Thought will not work except in silence,” Thomas Carlyle said. If we want to think better, we need to seize these moments of quiet. If we want more revelations—more insights or breakthroughs or new, big ideas—we have to create more room for them. We have to step away from the comfort of noisy distractions and stimulations. We have to start listening.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Suddenly,” Hakuin promised his students, “unexpectedly your teeth sink in. Your body will pour with cold sweat. At the instant, it will all become clear.” The word for this was satori—an illuminating insight when the inscrutable is revealed, when an essential truth becomes obvious and inescapable.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“There is, on the surface, a contradiction here. On the one hand, the Buddhists say we must empty our minds to be fully present. We’ll never get anything done if we are paralyzed by overthinking. On the other hand, we must look and think and study deeply if we are ever to truly know (and if we are to avoid”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“What’s essential is invisible to the eye.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“That space between your ears—that’s yours. You don’t just have to control what gets in, you also have to control what goes on in there. You have to protect it from yourself, from your own thoughts. Not with sheer force, but rather with a kind of gentle, persistent sweeping. Be the librarian who says “Shhh!” to the rowdy kids, or tells the jerk on his phone to please take it outside. Because the mind is an important and sacred place. Keep it clean and clear.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“It seems crazy, but it isn’t. “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

“The health of our spiritual ideals depends on what we do with our bodies in moments of truth.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“This is, in fact, the first obligation of a leader and a decision maker. 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

“Always think about what you’re 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

“Although we speak of attaining the dao,” Lao Tzu once said, “there is really nothing to obtain.” Or to borrow a master’s reply to a student who asked where he might find Zen: “You are seeking for an ox while you are yourself on it.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Work done for a reward is much lower than work done in the Yoga of wisdom. Set thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward. Work not for the reward; but never cease to do thy work. —THE BHAGAVAD GITA”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key