When a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.

Recommended reading: Pragmatism and Other Writings.

If a man will devote his time to securing facts in an impartial, objective way, his worries usually evaporate in the light of knowledge.

Recommended reading: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.

Think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass… if we do not take [tasks] one at a time and let them pass…slowly and evenly, then we are bound to break our own…structure.

Recommended reading: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.

The best possible way to prepare for tomorrow is to concentrate with all your intelligence, all your enthusiasm, on doing today’s work superbly today. That is the only possible way you can prepare for the future.

Recommended reading: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.

Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don’t realize this because almost everyone is suffering from it, so it is considered normal. This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness. The philosopher Descartes believed that he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: “I think, therefore I am”. He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with being and identity with thinking. The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects that ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind. Enlightenment is a state of wholeness, of being ‘at one’ and therefore at peace. Atone with life in its manifested aspect, the world, as well as with your deepest self and life unmanifested – at one with being. 

Recommended reading: The Power of Now.

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness. 

Recommended reading: Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel.

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it… but love it.

Recommended reading: Beyond Good and Evil.

The fates guide the person who accepts them and hinder the person who resists them.

Recommended reading: Essential Works of Stoicism.

Objective judgement, now at this very moment. Unselfish action, now at this very moment. Willing acceptance – now at this very moment – of all external events. That’s all you need.

Recommended reading: Meditations.

The struggle against an obstacle inevitably propels the fighter to a new level of functioning. The extent of the struggle determines the extent of the growth. The obstacle is an advantage, not adversity. The enemy is any perception that prevents us from seeing this.

Recommended reading: The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph.