Favorites

"You should not have a favorite weapon. To become over-familiar with one weapon is as much a fault as not knowing it sufficiently well. You should not copy others, but use weapons which you can handle properly. It is bad for commanders and troops to have likes and dislikes."

-Miyamoto Musashi, Book of Five Rings

Emotional Control

"Our Thinking Mind is like a horny dog on a leash that keeps running after things, and if we aren’t used to using our Observing Mind, then our Thinking Mind drags us along with it."

-Mark Manson (source)

Letting Go and Moving On

"I don't think that we let go of anything, I think what we do is just wear things out"

-Charlotte J. Beck

Work

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

-Confucius

Identity-Based Conflict

"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth."

"We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society."

- Alan Watts

"If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation. So you as the ego cannot afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to die. Wars have been fought over this, and countless relationships have broken down."

- Eckhart Tolle

Context -> Emotions -> Trust

"But no, you don't need to add emotion when there is none, because to do so, you often have to sacrifice trust."

-Seth Godin

Personal Narrative

"Every so often in my personal life with friends, I’ll have somebody who will be telling me, it’s usually over a meal, about they’re in a relationship, and it’s in trouble and this trouble has been going on for some time, often years, and it’s now heading for a crisis. And it’s one of those things where you know sort of, even though they don’t verbalize it, they’re asking, “What do you think? What do you think I should do?”

And after listening to the narrative for a while, every so often, I’ll say, “What movie are you living now?” And it always produces the same response. The person is startled because it sounds initially like a trivial question. They’re usually telling the story with considerable agony, and so they kind of freeze like a deer. And then their eyes rotate, usually upwards to the right, which is where a lot of people go when they’re searching their memory bank, and then they’ll laugh.

That’s the important point of this, and they’ll laugh and say, “The Exorcist,” or something like that. And the laugh is a sign of recognition that the story they’ve been telling me has a recognizable structure, and once they give me that, they then usually laugh again and say something like, “Oh, my God.” I then say, as quietly as I can, “And where does the story go?” And that’s the advice I’ve given them."

- Howard Suber

Remembering

"People will forget what you SAID, People will forget what you DID, but people will never forget how you made them FEEL."

- Maya Angelou