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61 " As a well-spent day brings a happy sleep, so a well-employed life brings a happy death. —LEONARDO DA VINCI "
― Ryan Holiday , Stillness Is the Key
62 " Don’t feed insecurity. Don’t feed delusions of grandeur. Both are obstacles to stillness. Be confident. You’ve earned it. "
63 " Professor John Stilgoe has simple advice: Get out now. Not just outside, but beyond the trap of the programmed electronic age so gently closing around so many people. . . . Go outside, move deliberately, then relax, slow down, look around. Do not jog. Do not run. . . . Instead pay attention to everything that abuts the rural road, the city street, the suburban boulevard. Walk. Stroll. Saunter. Ride a bike and coast along a lot. Explore. "
64 " So much of the distress we feel comes from reacting instinctually instead of acting with conscientious deliberation. So much of what we get wrong comes from the same place. We’re reacting to shadows. We’re taking as certainties impressions we have yet to test. We’re not stopping to put on our glasses and really look. "
65 " Get your day scheduled. Limit the interruptions. Limit the number of choices you need to make. "
66 " A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. —HERBERT SIMON "
67 " 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. "
68 " 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. "
69 " 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. "
70 " 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. "
71 " That is what journaling is about. It’s spiritual windshield wipers, as the writer Julia Cameron once put it. "
72 " 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. "
73 " Build a life that you don’t need to escape from. "
74 " Everybody's got a hungry heart - that's true. But how we choose to feed that heart matters. It's what determines the kind of person we end up being, what kind of trouble we'll get into, and whether we'll ever be full, whether we'll ever really be still. "
75 " Each of us must cultivate a moral code, a higher standard that we love almost more than life itself. Each of us must sit down and ask: What's important to me? What would I rather die for than betray? How am I going to live and why? "
76 " There is perhaps no one less at peace than the egomaniac, their mind a swirling miasma of their own grandiosity and insecurity "
77 " 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. "
78 " A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness and that to seek it is perversion. —JOHN GRAVES "
79 " 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. "
80 " 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. "