“[T]hou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself.”
“So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.”
“Like vanishing dew, a passing apparition or the sudden flash of lightning -- already gone -- thus should one regard one s self.”
“I ve decided that I m not going to try to squeeze myself into a friendship that hurts me anymore. I m going to let her go and just be friends with people who make me feel good about myself.”
“When you re rotten about yourself, you become rotten to everyone else, even those you love.”
“You don t know how to talk to people you don t like. Don t love, really. You can t live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.”
“For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary – or perhaps more like mediocre – level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.”
“There s always the option of deciding for yourself who you are and what you ll become.”
“If you own this story you get to write the ending.”
“My mother always told me No monster lived beneath my bed, But she had failed to warn me It laid on top of it instead.”
“Stop in somebody s shadow to rest and cool down, and you are lost. No one can make anyone else happy.”
“We all have bad things inside us, and we all choose either to give in to those bad things or to fight them.”
“You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.”
“We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us”
“The square root of I is I.”
“We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe.”
“In still moments by the sea life seems large-drawn and simple. It is there we can see into ourselves.”