Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be. How much you can love. What you can accomplish. And what your potential is.

Recommended reading: Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.

What you are will show, ultimately. Start now, every day, becoming, in your actions, your regular actions, what you would like to become in the bigger scheme of things.

Recommended reading: Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts-For Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind.

The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it’s not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person – without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.

Recommended reading: Courage: The Joy of Living Dangerously.

 

To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.

Recommended reading: The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

We do the best we can with the tools we have at our disposal… There is nobility in the effort, courage in the dailiness – the doggedness. It is a process of trying and failing. Of beginning again.

Recommended reading: The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself.

We live in a society that encourages us to think about how to have a great career but leaves many of us inarticulate about how to cultivate the inner life. The competition to succeed and win admiration is so fierce that it becomes all-consuming… The noise of fast and shallow communications makes it harder to hear the quieter sounds that emanate from the depths. We live in a culture that teaches us to promote and advertise ourselves and to master the skills required for success, but that gives little encouragement to humility, sympathy, and honest self-confrontation, which are necessary for building character.

Recommended reading: The Road to Character.

If you really learn how to pay attention… it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Recommend reading: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.

Start by doing what is necessary; then do what is possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.

Recommended reading: Francis of Assisi in His Own Words: The Essential Writings.

He who says “Better to go without belief forever than believe in a lie!” merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe… It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.

Recommended reading: The Will to Believe.

Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, once you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully set them behind you, and go on to the next big opportunity. But that is not enough: you should actively seek out opportunities to make grand mistakes. just so you can then recover from them.

Recommended reading: Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking.