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Stillness Is the Key QUOTES

Stillness Is the Key QUOTES

1 " Most of us would be seized with fear if our bodies went numb, and would do everything possible to avoid it, yet we take no interest at all in the numbing of our souls. —EPICTETUS "

― Ryan Holiday , Stillness Is the Key

2 " Stillness is what aims the archer’s arrow. It inspires new ideas. It sharpens perspective and illuminates connections. "

― Ryan Holiday , Stillness Is the Key

3 " If solitude is the school of genius, as the historian Edward Gibbon put it, then the crowded, busy world is the purgatory of the idiot. "

― Ryan Holiday , Stillness Is the Key

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " Routine, done for long enough and done sincerely enough, becomes more than routine. It becomes ritual—it becomes sanctified and holy. "

― Ryan Holiday , Stillness Is the Key

7 " This is what the best journals look like. They aren’t for the reader. They are for the writer. To slow the mind down. To wage peace with oneself. "

― Ryan Holiday , Stillness Is the Key

8 " 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. "

― Ryan Holiday , Stillness Is the Key

9 " All of humanity’s problems,” Blaise Pascal said in 1654, “stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. "

― Ryan Holiday , Stillness Is the Key

10 " Be present. 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

11 " If you wish to improve,” Epictetus once said, “be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters. "

― Ryan Holiday , Stillness Is the Key

12 " 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 as important, honorable, and admirable. The choices we make in that regard determine whether we will experience peace or not. "

― Ryan Holiday , Stillness Is the Key

13 " The less energy we waste regretting the past or worrying about the future, the more energy we will have for what’s in front of us. "

― Ryan Holiday , Stillness Is the Key

14 " Remember, there’s no greatness in the future. Or clarity. Or insight. Or happiness. Or peace. There is only this moment. "

― Ryan Holiday , Stillness Is the Key

15 " Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save face. Put yourself in his shoes—so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil—nothing is so self-blinding. "

― Ryan Holiday , Stillness Is the Key

16 " The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON "

― Ryan Holiday , Stillness Is the Key

17 " We have to get better at thinking, deliberately and intentionally, about the big questions. On the complicated things. On understanding what’s really going on with a person, or a situation, or with life itself. "

― Ryan Holiday , Stillness Is the Key

18 " It takes real work to grasp what is invisible to just about everyone else. "

― Ryan Holiday , Stillness Is the Key

19 " If the mind is disciplined, the heart turns quickly from fear to love. —JOHN CAGE "

― Ryan Holiday , Stillness Is the Key

20 " We are restless because deep in our hearts we know now that our happiness is found elsewhere, and our work, no matter how valuable it is to us or to others, cannot take its place. But we hurry on anyway, and attend to our business because we need to matter, and we don’t always realize we already do. "

― Ryan Holiday , Stillness Is the Key