See all previous ones here. Tucker Max writes a monthly quotes post which is great.
Love the way this sounds:
Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree. – Joyce Kilmer
From a favorite Brooks article:
I saw young people with deep moral yearnings. But they tended to convert moral questions into resource allocation questions; questions about how to be into questions about what to do…It’s worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero. – David Brooks
Even other cultures, millenia ago, were thinking about habits:
Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habit. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny. – Lao Tzu
Reminds me of the rage to master:
The dirty little secret of every creative workshop or motivational seminar is simply this: The person who is going to change is going to change anyway. She has no choice. She is impelled by inner necessity. – Steven Pressfield
I don’t like when people say that something is “strictly business” or that they’re “being logical”. Your emotions are to thinking like bread is to a sandwich, without which it cannot exist.
Reason is and ought to be only a slave to the passions, and can never pretend to be any other office than to serve and obey them. – David Hume
Certainly feels true, no?
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket – Eric Hoffer
Meditation is helping me with this:
Infinite patience gets you immediate results – James Altucher
I suck at this:
Love your enemies, for they tell you your faults – Ben Franklin
I agree with the below. Sometimes overly so?
The only path to amazing runs directly through not-so-amazing – Seth Godin
Like the old saw, “a fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing”…
Fanaticism is the only way to put an end to the doubts that constantly trouble the human soul – Paulo Coehlo
Haha:
If most of your courtship attempts have succeeded, you must be a very attractive and charming person who has been aiming too low – Geoffrey Miller
Why I stay away from email and social media in the evening:
Arguing with people is like reading your email at 4am in the morning. There is absolutely no good that can come of it. It’s just scratching an itch – James Altucher
This Hemingway guy, really something:
This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an effect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic quality. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.
-Ernest Hemingway