Lemons from lemonade

When my thoughts get muddled and cob-webbed inside the head, I often like to read some quotes and witty liners to reflect upon or cheer myself up with. Here are some that caught my eye over the last year –

Matt Haig –
Sometimes the only way to learn, is to live.

WS Merwin –
Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle.  Everything I do is stitched with its colour.

Sylvia Plath –
I’m glad the rain is coming down hard. It’s the way I feel inside. 

Howard Thurman –
Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

Richard P. Feynman –
The first principle is to not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Nassem Taleb –
If you want to become a philosopher king, first become a king, then a philosopher.

Naval Ravikant –

• Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
• Would I still be interested in learning about this thing if I knew I couldn’t tell anyone about it?
• We are not looking for peace of mind, but peace from mind.
• Peace is happiness at rest, happiness is peace in motion.
• The closer you get to the truth, the more silent you are inside.
• Self-esteem is a reputation you have with yourself. You always know.
• Lead, follow or get out of the way.
• If there’s something you do that seems like play for you but work for others, that’s what you want to focus on.

Confucius –

• Every man has two lives and the second one begins when he realizes he has just one.
• A happy person wants ten thousand things, a sick person wants just one thing.

Thoreau –

• How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
• There is no remedy for love but to love more.
• Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.
• Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.
• The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
• The rarest quality in an epitaph is the truth.
• Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good be good for something.
• None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
• Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
• Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?
• Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.
• What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.
• The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
• How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

Rumi –

• You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.
• Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
• Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?
• Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.
• Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.
• The wound is the place where the light enters you.
• Wherever you are, and whatever you do, be in love.
• Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion. Bewilderment brings intuitive knowledge.
• As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.
• The only lasting beauty is the beauty of the heart.
• Close your eyes, fall in love, stay there.
• Let yourself become living poetry.
• You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life.
• When I am silent, I fall into the place where everything is music.
• Love sometimes wants to do us a great favour: hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out.
• The world is a mountain, in which your words are echoed back to you.
• All your anxiety is because of your desire for harmony. Seek disharmony, then you will gain peace.
• Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it.
• Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
• If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?
• Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

Mark Twain –

• Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that crushed it.
• It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.   
• Age is a case of mind over matter; if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter!
• The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.
• When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain. 
• It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

My thoughts –

• It’s easy to be a Because, aspire to be a Despite.
• Life is a continuous process of trade-off. We are constantly giving up one thing for another.
• Adulting is like finding yourself in the eye of a cyclone. The only catch is, it is up to you to remain calm.
• When the mind is full of heavy, dark clouds, let it rain, let it rain through the eyes.

Phil’s-osophy (if you know, you know) –

• Success is 1% inspiration, 98% perspiration and 2% attention to detail.
• Take a lesson from Parakeets. If you’re ever feeling lonely, just eat in front of a mirror.
• Never be afraid to reach for the stars because even if you fall, you’ll always be wearing a parent-chute.
• When life gives you lemonade, make lemons. Life will be all like “what?!”