All quotes courtesy of Gretchen Rubin
“The secret of contentment is knowing how to enjoy what you have, and to be able to lose all desire for things beyond your reach.”
Lin Yutang
“If we pick up a brush, we feel like writing; if we hold a musical instrument in our hands, we wish to play.”
Essays in Idleness, The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko
“I think that it is useless to fight directly against natural weaknesses. One has to force oneself to act as though one did not have them in circumstances where a duty makes it imperative; and in the ordinary course of life one has to know these weaknesses, prudently take them into account, and strive to turn them to good purpose; for they are all capable of being put to some good purpose.”
Simone Weil, Waiting For God
“To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882)
“The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.”
Samuel Butler
“The satisfaction to be derived from success in a great constructive enterprise is one of the most massive that life has to offer.”
Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
“Reject your sense of injury, and the injury itself disappears.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
