Pieces worth sitting with.
- This Is Water
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
— David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College Commencement, 2005→ - The Opposite of Loneliness
We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together.
— Marina Keegan, Yale Daily News, 2012→ - The Empathy Exams
Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse.
— Leslie Jamison, The Believer, 2014→ - On Self-Respect
Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.
— Joan Didion, Vogue, 1961→ - Keep Your Identity Small
The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.
— Paul Graham, paulgraham.com, 2009→ - Solitude and Leadership
Solitude is the very essence of leadership. The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many people you may consult, you are the one who has to make the hard decisions. And at such moments, all you really have is yourself.
— William Deresiewicz, The American Scholar, 2010→ - Atlas Shrugged
I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
— Ayn Rand, Random House, 1957→ - The Changing World Order
History has shown that there have always been and always will be big cycles — rises and declines of wealth and power — and they have always seemed surprising to those who weren’t paying attention to the patterns.
— Ray Dalio, Simon & Schuster, 2021→ - From Third World to First
I was never a prisoner of any theory. What guided me were reason and reality. The acid test I applied to every theory or scheme was, would it work?
— Lee Kuan Yew, HarperCollins, 2000→ - The Egg
Every time you victimized someone, you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.
— Andy Weir, Galactanet, 2009→