Blog — Quotes

When Alexander The Great was alive the world was not big enough to contain his ambition but while Alexander chafed at the confines of the world in life, in death, “a coffin was enough.”

The soul is healed by being with children.

If you do not know what port you are sailing to, no wind is favorable.

Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

Time is too slow for those who wait,
too swift for those who fear,
too long for those who grieve,
too short for those who rejoice,
but for those who love,
time is eternity.

Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly.

Yes, we need to make a living.
But how do we make a life?

Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens: then you will be happy.

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.

Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man—on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can—if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods can ask of you.

Because gunshots, lies, and oxtail—or whatever you want to call your god—should say Yes over and over, in cycles, in spirals, with no other reason but to hear itself exist. Because love, at its best, repeats itself. Shouldn’t it?

Work is the expression of our energy and our dreams. We owe those along for the journey the same dignity and connection we would like to receive in return.

The cucumber is bitter? Then throw it out.
There are brambles in the path? Then go around them.
That's all you need to know. Nothing more. Don't demand to know "why such things exist." Anyone who understands the world will laugh at you, just as a carpenter would if you seemed shocked at finding sawdust in his workshop, or a shoemaker at scraps of leather left over from work.
Of course, they have a place to dispose of these; nature has no door to sweep things out of. But the wonderful thing about its workmanship is how, faced with that limitation, it takes everything within it that seems broken, old and useless, transforms it into itself, and makes new things from it. So that it doesn't need material from any outside source, or anywhere to dispose of what's left over. It relies on itself for all it needs: space, material, and labor.