MY OWN THOUGHTS:
“You are what you do, not what you dream.” Martin Tobias
“If you are only a consumer, you will always lack wealth.” Martin Tobias
“Be decisive. Right or wrong, make a decision. The road of life is paved with flat squirrels who couldn’t make a decision.” Martin Tobias
“When I can buy anything I want and decide to buy nothing, that is something.” Martin Tobias
“The grass isn’t greener on the other side. The grass is greener where you water it.” Martin Tobias
“Have a budget for all the fucks you give.” Martin Tobias
“Not making a decision IS a decision.” Martin Tobias
“Tranquility is achieved through equality, not superiority” . Martin Tobias
“The journey is the destination.” Martin Tobias
“Do not be the tilt you want to take advantage in the world.” Martin Tobias
“The past doesn’t matter and the future doesn’t exist. The only thing that matters is doing the next right thing.” Martin Tobias
“Truth” is determined by your frame (stories). You can choose your frames.” Martin Tobias
“Judgements are not the Truth. They can’t be. They are opinions.” Martin Tobias
“Science is an analogy, a theory.” Martin Tobias
FROM OTHERS:
“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” Mark Twain
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” Peter Thiel
“Not making a decision is a decision.” Terry Rose, my highschool debate team teacher.
“Non action is action.” Tai Chi.
“The half life of any negative state is incredibly short.” Sam Harris.
“Be scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid.” Faulkner.
“The ideal psychic state is not something to be newly made or created but experienced with the removal of those accretions which have hidden and thus prevented a realization of the self which we already are.” Pierre Hadot
“Happiness is an inside job. Don’t assign anyone else that much power over your life.” Mandy Hale,
“All of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room.” Blaise Pascal.
“You will never find yourself in what you have built to define yourself.” Untethered Soul
“If you take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I will show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” The Matrix
“It is all just stuff that has to be done. So do it.” Linda Treger (former therapist)
“Put fear in its place – as and advisor, not the captain.” The Flinch (book)
“Be like water my friend” Bruce Lee
“The master should have the selling habit, not the buying habit.” Cato the Elder
“Distraction destroys Destiny” . Sachen Patel
“Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive”. Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.
“A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time”, Mark Twain.
“The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.” Soren Kierkegaard.
“Work is about the search, too, for daily meanings well as daily bread, for recognition as well as for cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.” Studs Terkel, Working.
“One swallow does not a summer make, nor one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.” Aristotle
“When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.” Seneca.
“It is no exaggeration to say that every human being is hypnotized to some extent either by ideas he has uncritically accepted from others or ideas he has repeated to himself or convinced himself are true. These negative ideas have exactly the same effect upon our behavior as the negative ideas implanted into the mind of a hypnotized subject by a professional hypnotist.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life
“In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.
On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
“Always pass on what you have learned.” Yoda
“Do. Or do not. There is no try.” Yoda
“You will find only what you bring in.” Yoda
“Just keep swimming.”, Dori, Finding Nemo
“The happy man is not he who seems thus to others, but who seems thus to himself.” Publilius Syrus.
“The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide you’re not going to stay where you are.” John Pierpont “J.P.” Morgan
“The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder.” Thomas Carlyle
“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” Stanley Kubrick.
“A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years.”
― Byron Katie, Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“Don’t believe everything you think.”
― Byron Katie
“Placing the blame or judgment on someone else leaves you powerless to change your experience; taking responsibility for your beliefs and judgments gives you the power to change them”
― Byron Katie
“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop and look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.” Eleanor Roosevelt.
“We have two lives. The first life and the second life after you realize you only have one life.” unattributed.
“There are only two tragedies in life: One is not getting what one wants; and the other is getting it.” Oscar Wilde.
“Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful” Warren Buffet.
“Objective judgment, now at this very moment.
Unselfish action, now at this very moment.
Willing acceptance – now at this very moment – of all external events.
That’s all you need.”
Marcus Aurelius
“Our actions may be impeded … but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle of our acting.
The impediment to action advances action.
What stands in the way becomes the way.”
Marcus Aurelius
“The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.” Marcus Aurelius
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” -Thoreau
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” -Richard Feynman
Epictetus asked the question: “How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself?”
“You shouldn’t give circumstances the power to rouse anger, for they don’t care at all.” – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7.38
“You are not your body and hair style, but your capacity for choosing well. If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be.” Epictetus discourses 3.1.39b-40a
“We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.” Epictetus.
“You become what you give your attention to…if you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will.” Epictetus.
Alan Watts: “To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim, you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do, you will sink and drown. Instead, you relax and float.”
“If you think you can or you think you can’t, you are right.” Henry Ford.
“For such a small price, I buy tranquillity,” Epictetus’s line about ignoring small slights.
Philosophy,” Juvenal wrote, “by degrees, peels off most of our follies and vices, first shows us what’s right.”
“It is not that life is short, it is that we waste alot of it.” Seneca
“Certainty is created within YOU not by your environment.” Tony Robbins
“Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never ending commitment.” No finish line. Nike ad
“The duty of a man is to be useful to his fellow men; if possible to be useful to many of them; failing this, to be useful to a few; failing this, to be useful to his neighbors, and failing them, to himself; for when he helps others, he advances the general interests of mankind.” Seneca
“A rock thrown in the air, it loses nothing by coming down, gained nothing by going up.” Marcus Aurelius.
“Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising us the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. The whole future lies in uncertainty; live immediately.” SENECA
From Kim-An Williams, wife of my friend Matt Williams who died young after a long battle with cancer. “I did not like being sick, but I did realize some important things through that experience. One especially important lesson I learned is NEVER TO ASSUME THAT YOU KNOW SOMEONE ELSE’S STORY. Everyone has something that they struggle with in life. Everyone understands what it means to miss someone that they love. You will meet lots of different people in your life, and not all of them will share your experience of having a mom who died when they were young, but they might have a different experience that can help them to relate to how you feel. You become a stronger person when you really understand what it means to be sad and what it means to be happy. You will be able to help other people understand their own sadness and happiness too.”
“Knowledge can be conveyed, but not wisdom. It can be found, it can be lived, it is possible to be carried by it, miracles can be per-formed with it, but it cannot be expressed in words and thoughts.” Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse
“There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so” . Shakespeare Hamlet
“In war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one.” Napoleon
“Complaining isn’t a strategy. You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it to be.” Jeff Bezos
“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today” . Abraham Lincoln
“For countless generations our biochemical system adpated to increase our chances of survival and reproduction, not our happiness.” Homo Deus
“A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.” Lao Tzu
