SO GOOD QUOTES

Category: VOCATION

  • As the British philosopher Bertrand Russell put it in The Conquest of Happiness (1930):

    A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase.

    In 1918, Russell spent four and a half months in Brixton prison for ‘pacifist propaganda’, but found the bare conditions congenial and conducive to creativity:

    I found prison in many ways quite agreeable … I had no engagements, no difficult decisions to make, no fear of callers, no interruptions to my work. I read enormously; I wrote a book, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy … and began the work for Analysis of Mind … One time, when I was reading Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, I laughed so loud that the warder came round to stop me, saying I must remember that prison was a place of punishment.

    Boredom is but a window to a sunny day beyond the gloom

  • What do you love doing so much that the words failure and success essentially become irrelevant?

    —Elizabeth Gilbert

  • “Yes, I have shattered your projects, I have annihilated your pride. Nobody needs you, you live without self-contentment, you are before me like a lamp which shines for the satisfaction of nobody, – you are ‘without any purpose.’ But you are my love and my glory, I placed my delight in you, you are the portion reserved to me, so well preserved that you are wanted by nobody else, and that you do not even think of being useful, you are my purest reflection because you have become the saints you did not want to become.”

    (L. Evely)

  • “Different is better than better.”  

    —Sally 

    “When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different.”  

    —James Clear

    “Don’t seek to be the best. Seek to be the only.” 

    —Kevin Kelly

    “They’re not the best at what they do—they’re the only ones that do what they do.”

    —Bill Graham

  • “One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was: go slow to go fast. We live as though there aren’t enough hours in the day but if we do each thing calmly and carefully we will get it done quicker and with much less stress.”

    — Viggo Mortensen

  • Don’t ask yourself, “What am I better at?”

    Ask, “How am I different?”

    Being Different Beats Being Better

  • “I want to live a life that doesn’t require an alarm clock—one that I can’t wait to wake up and start living each day.”

    —Joshua Becker, A Life Worth Waking Up For

  • “When you believe in the value you provide so much that you are doing people a disservice by not offering them your services, you’re on track to creating colossal value.”

    —Benjamin P. Hardy

  • Can you really think that the inner peace you are seeking depends on the locality you finally choose to live in? Surely, inner peace is acquired only by humbly living in accordance with the commandments: Learn of me: for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls (Matt. 11.29).

    Where you do it is beside the question….

    Letters of Elder Macarius of Optina

  • And if you feel like you don’t do very much, and you feel like there’s no way God loves you. There are some people, they’re shocked, when I hear the struggles that they have in their life, the crosses that they bear, and I tell them, “If you only knew…” like they’re waiting for me to tell them that their problem is going to go away, and I tell them “No, your crown is going to be glorious in heaven.” And you say “I’m just a normal person, Abouna, I don’t do what all these other people do, I don’t do all these great things.” You’re comparing yourself to others.

    —Fr. Paul Girguis