"Think not in terms of ultimate success, Of plaques hanging on the wall And trophies glittering on a shelf. Concentrate rather on the first step, The first obstacle, And find a way to cast it aside."
Jack McDevitt, Octavia Gone
"The most common cause of plans going wrong and preparations collapsing can usually be traced to a communication breakdown. The secret to management success, in peace or war, is to explain strategy in clear terms, and to listen. Acquire those two skills, and fate will be kind."
Jack McDevitt, Octavia Gone
"A friend is a second self."
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Jack McDevitt, Octavia Gone
"It's okay to feel all of the stuff you're feeling. You're just becoming human again. You're not doing life wrong; you're doing it right. If there's any secret you're missing, it's that doing it right is just really hard. Feeling all your feelings is hard, but that's what they're for. Feelings are for feeling. All of them. Even the hard ones. The secret is that you're doing it right, and that doing it right hurts sometimes."
Glennon Doyle, Untamed
"There is a life meant for you that is truer than the one you're living. But in order to have it, you will have to forge it yourself. You will have to create on the outside what you are imagining on the inside. Only you can bring it forth. And it will cost you everything."
Glennon Doyle, Untamed
"Perhaps for us ... the deepest truth is not what we can see but what we can imagine."
Glennon Doyle, Untamed
Since I got sober, I have never been fine again, not for a single moment. I have been exhausted and terrified and angry. I have been overwhelmed and underwhelmed and debilitatingly depressed and anxious. I have been amazed and awed and delighted and overjoyed to bursting. I have been reminded, constantly, by the Ache: This will pass, stay close.
I have been alive.
Glennon Doyle, Untamed
Brave does not mean feeling afraid and doing it anyway.
Brave means living from the inside out. Brave means, in every uncertain moment, turning inward, feeling for the Knowing, and speaking it out load.
Glennon Doyle, Untamed
Maybe Eve was never meant to be our warning. Maybe she was meant to be our model.
Own your wanting
Eat the apple.
Let it burn.
Glennon Doyle, Untamed
"Keep serving the freaking peanuts..."
Glennon Doyle, Untamed
My mother loves me. And she disagrees with me about what is best for me. I am going to have to decide who I trust more: my mother of myself. For the first time in my life, I decided to trust myself - even though that meant moving in direct opposition to my parents. I decided to please myself instead of my parents. I decided to become responsible for my own life, my own joy, my own family. And I decided to do it with love.
That is when I became an adult.
Glennon Doyle, Untamed
"This way of life requires living in integrity: ensuring that my inner self and outer self are integrated. Integrity means having only one self. Dividing into two selves - the shown self and the hidden self - that is brokenness, so I do whatever it takes to stay whole. I do not adjust myself to please the world. I am myself wherever I am, I let the world adjust."
Glennon Doyle, Untamed
"Blessed are those brave enough to make things awkward, for they wake up and move us forward."
Glennon Doyle, Untamed
"Everyone fails at who they are supposed to be ... The measure of a person, a hero, is how well they succeed at being who they are."
Frigga, Queen of Asgard, mother of Thor, Avengers Endgame
"Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane."
Fausto Maijstral, in Thomas Pynchon's V
Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff
"The thing you have to conquer most obviously us yourself." It's not the attitude of "no-pain, no gain." Nor is he given me "permission to fail." Instead he's talking about something very different, something so fundamental that we often forget about it whether we're learning something new or just going about our lives: you need a way of testing your thought process. Before I get fancy with strategy, with the curlicues and trappings of expertise, I need to answer something far more basic: Am I thinking correctly?
Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff
"You become a big winner when you lose. Everyone plays well when they're winning. But can you control yourself and play well when you're losing?"
Dan Harrington
Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff
"When things go wrong, other people see it as unfairness that's always surrounding them. They take it personally. They don't know how to lose, how to learn from losing. The look for something or someone to blame. They don't step back to analyze their own decisions, their own play, where they may have gone wrong themselves."
Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff
"When it comes to learning, Triumph is the real foe; it's Disaster that's your teacher. It's Disaster that brings objectivity. It's Disaster that's the antidote to the greatest of delusions, overconfidence."
Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff
"...you can't play scared. You can't be afraid of how you look. You can't be afraid someone will walk away because of what you do or don't do."
Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff
"How we frame something affects not just our thinking but our emotional state, it may seem a small deal, but the words we select - the ones we filter out and the ones we eventually choose to put forward - are a mirror to our thinking. Clarity of language is clarity of thought - and the expression of a certain sentiment, no matter how innocuous it seems, can change your learning, your thinking, your mindset, your mood, your whole outlook."
Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff
"Never feel like you have to do something just because it's expected of you - even if you're the one who expects it. Know when to step back. Know when to recalibrate. Know when you need to reassess your strategy prior plans be damned."
Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff
"How is it possible, in the age of global communication, where all cultural, linguistic, geographical, and economic borders had been erased from the face of the earth, that this vast new realm had only created a multitude of loners, infinite numbers of lonely people in communication with one another, yes, but still in a state of utter solitude."
Andrea Camilleri, The Safety Net
"All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints."
David Sedaris, Holidays On Ice
"...at war, you often find yourself becoming a twin of the enemy, just as bad as the thing you fear."
Hannu Rajaniemi, The Fractal Prince
"The key to survival ... was to know what one ought to remember and then forget it immediately. Don't look back. Don't pick at what's passed. Let go. ... There is only the present. Which is why always is an illusory word."
Lan Cao and Harlan Margaret Van Cao, Family in Six Tones
"... I never realized how similar I am to my mother until now, because she and I seem so different, We are just two deaf best friends having one long conversation."
Lan Cao and Harlan Margaret Van Cao, Family in Six Tones
"Sometimes you are erased because you let it happen. And sometimes what you long for is not to be seen but to be effaced."
Lan Cao and Harlan Margaret Van Cao, Family in Six Tones
"I was just waiting for the time to pass, to feel better, to realize that much of life is about stamina..."
Lan Cao and Harlan Margaret Van Cao, Family in Six Tones
"I now know that if someone appears "normal," your probably don't know them."
Lan Cao and Harlan Margaret Van Cao, Family in Six Tones
"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story."
Orson Welles
Lan Cao and Harlan Margaret Van Cao, Family in Six Tones
"I did not go looking for my house or the spot where it once stood. Home was not a place you could return to. Home was a place you could lose."
Lan Cao and Harlan Margaret Van Cao, Family in Six Tones
"If you are wholly predictable, people will learn to hack you."
Rory Sutherland, Family in Six Tones
"There is no such thing as a rational or irrational belief - there is only rational or irrational behaviour."
Rory Sutherland, Family in Six Tones
"First, it doesn't always pay to be logical if everyone else is also being logical. Logic may be a good way to defend and explain a decision, but it is not always a good way to reach one. ... The second interesting thing is that we have no real unitary measure of what is important and what is not - the same quality can be seen as a curse or a blessing depending on how you think of it."
Rory Sutherland, Family in Six Tones
"The advertisements which bees find useful are flowers - and if you think about it, a flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget."
Rory Sutherland, Family in Six Tones
"People do not choose Brand A over Brand B because they think Brand A is better, but because they are more certain that it is good."
Rory Sutherland, Family in Six Tones
"Perception may map neatly on to behaviour, but reality does not map neatly onto perception."
Rory Sutherland, Family in Six Tones
"...conventional logic is hopeless in marketing - as you end up in the same place as your competitors."
Rory Sutherland, Family in Six Tones
"...not even accountants or economists use logic to solve everyday domestic dilemmas, so why do they instinctively reach for calculators and spreadsheets the moment they enter an office? The conventional answer is that we deploy more rigour and structure to our decision-making in business because so much is at stake; but another, less optimistic, explanation is that the limitations of this approach are in fact what makes it appealing - the last thing people want when faced with a problem is a range of creative solutions, with no means of choosing between them other than subjective judgement. It seems safer to create an artificial model that allows one logical solution and to claim that the decision was driven by 'facts' rather than opinion: remember that what often matters most to those making a decision in business or government is not a successful outcome, but their ability to defend their decision, whatever the outcome may be."
Rory Sutherland, Family in Six Tones
"Where there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek."
Esther Perel, Mating In Captivity
"When lovers engage sexually as free agents, turning surrender into an act of self-assertion, there is no need to get it over with. Precipitating the grand finale isn't so much the point as savoring the mutual trust and intimacy along the way."
Esther Perel, Mating In Captivity
"Eros is a force that doesn't like to be constrained."
Esther Perel, Mating In Captivity
"It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before ... to test your limits ... To break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
Anais Nin
Esther Perel, Mating In Captivity
"In this world there are only two tragedies. One is getting what one wants, and the other is not getting it."
Oscar Wilde
Esther Perel, Mating In Captivity
"...never interrupt a villain who is monologuing."
Hannu Rajaniemi, The Causal Angel
"I didn't need easy. I just needed possible."
Bethany Hamilton, Hidden Brain, Minimizing Pain, Maximizing Joy
"Do what you can with what you got with where you are."
William Irvine, Hidden Brain, Minimizing Pain, Maximizing Joy
"You've got one life to live and it's happening right now."
William Irvine, Hidden Brain, Minimizing Pain, Maximizing Joy