Quotes & Ideas worth Meditating on:

“Always to see the general in the particular is the very foundation of genius" - Arthur Schopenhauer

“Every prophet has to come from civilization, but every process has to go into the wilderness. This is the process by which psychic dynamite is made." -Churchill

"Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." - G. Michael Hopf

“To a great strategist, the future should never be a surprise.
To a great tactician, the present should never be an obstacle."
- @EdLatimore

“Everything will be taken from you on this path. Everything. It’s easier to let go than to hold.” -Jac O'Keeffe

The trouble with opportunity is, it never announces when it comes. It's only after it's gone, you'd realize that you missed it." — Uday Kotak

“The Stoic tells himself that although the situation may appear frightening, the truly important thing in life is how he chooses to respond.”
-Donald Robertson

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Envy consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations. If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon, but Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed.”
-Bertrand Russell

“Drain out your desire till the cup carries grace. There is no one there looking back, Look here.” -Rumi

"To live the good life: We have the potential for it. If we can learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference." Marcus Aurelius.

“When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.”
-La Rochefoucauld

“The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.” -St. Jerome

"The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him." -Niccolo Machiavelli

“As your island of knowledge grows, so too does the shoreline of ignorance." John Wheeler

“Is the struggle with this mask worthwhile?”-Carl Jung

“There’s no emotion more eager for vengeance than anger, and for that very reason, none less suited to the taking of vengeance.” -Seneca

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. -Frankl

"If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so… The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance." -Alan Watts

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

“Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed, you must believe that you are being harmed. If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation." - Epictetus

“man fundamentally is the desire to be God”. -Jean-Paul Sartre

Whatever we plant in our subconscious mind and nourish with repetition and emotion will one day become a reality”
— Earl Nightingale

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” — Helen Keller

“Human beings have been made for the sake of one another. Teach them or endure them.” -Marcus Aurelius

Meditate often on the interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of all things in the universe. For in a sense, all things are mutually woven together and therefore have an affinity for each other...

for one thing follows after another according to their tension of movement, their sympathetic stirrings, and the unity of all substance.” -M.A.

“A man who dares to waste an hour of time has not discovered the value of his life.”
— Charles Darwin

“This then we should practice and work on first of all—like the man who threw a stone at his dog but missed and hit his stepmother. “Not so bad!” he said. For it is possible to change what we get out of things that do not go as we wish. Diogenes was driven into exile:...

“Not so bad!” for it was after his banishment that he took up philosophy.”
— Plutarch, On Tranquility 6 (467c)

Why is it that we are not stirred up when we meet someone whose body is disfigured or disabled, yet cannot tolerate a deformed mind without being enraged? Such vicious severity reflects more on the critic than on the defect.
—Montaigne, Of the Art of Conference

“It is not against death that we prepare; that is too momentary a thing. A quarter of an hour’s suffering, without aftereffects and without damage, does not require special instruction. In truth, we prepare ourselves against the preparations for death.”
—Montaigne Of Physiognomy

“The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he looks at it”Schopenhauer

“If you would enjoy real freedom, you must be the slave of philosophy.” Epicurius

There is some use in occasionally looking upon terrible misfortunes—such as might happen to us—as though they had actually happened, for then the trivial reverses which subsequently come in reality, are much easier to bear. It is a source of consolation to look back upon those...

great misfortunes which never happened.”
—Schopenhauer, Our Relation to Ourselves (1851)

“The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.” Will Durant

"How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself?”
-Epictetus

“Though man has decided to domesticate himself, his heart remains wild.” -Kapil Gupta

"Nearly everyone has his box of secret pain, shared with no one." John Steinbeck

“For Art reaches into a place that they have forever concealed from the outside world.
Art captures the longing for unspeakable things.
Art understands, where the intellect can only explain.” -Kapil Gupta

“A man must defend himself, if only to demonstrate his fitness to defend anything else.” Frederick Douglass

“My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart.” -Carl Jung

“Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers…he transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find refuge from every...

peril and to outlive the longest night.” -C.J.

“Moloch is exactly what the history books say he is. He is the god of child sacrifice, the fiery furnace into which you can toss your babies in exchange for victory in war. He always and everywhere offers the same deal: throw what you love most into the flames,...

and I can grant you power. As long as the offer’s open, it will be irresistible. So we need to close the offer.” - Scott Alexander

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
C.G. Jung

“Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it.” -Nietzsche

“There are many things for the spirit, for the strong heavy spirit in which dwell respect and awe: its strength longs for the heavy, for the heaviest […] thus it kneels down like the camel and and wants to be well-laden.”

“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary […] but love it.” Nietzsche

“People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don’t know each other; they don’t know each other because they have not communicated with each other.”
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Show me a man who is not a slave…..one is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition, and all men are slaves to fear.” -Seneca

“Fate leads the willing and drags along the reluctant.” ––Seneca

“Make the best use of what is in your power and take the rest as it happens.” ––Epictetus

“It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character. Otherwise, it cannot harm you––inside or out.” ––Marcus Aurelius

“He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at.” ––Epictetus

“Fools say they learn by experience. I prefer to profit by other people’s experience.” -Bismarck

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin." - Aldous Huxley