“Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present.” Seneca 

“If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are ‘crying for the moon’.” Alan Watts

“When we are present to what is, we are right up front with the expansion of time, but when we make a mistake and get frozen in what was, a layer of detachment builds. Time goes on and we stop.” Josh Waitzkin

“Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future … You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours.” Seneca

“There may be moments in life when we are so unformed that we need to use values like an exoskeleton to keep us from collapsing. But something is very wrong if such moments recur often in adulthood. Trying to live someone else’s life, or to live by an abstract norm, will invariably fail - and may even do great damage.” Parker J. Palmer

“There’s a significant cultural distinction between a high school drop-out and a Yale graduate.” Seth Godin

“When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else … you surrender your own integrity [and] become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.” Eleanor Roosevelt

“If such people want to know how short their lives are, let them reflect how small a portion is their own.” Seneca

“It is inevitable that life will be not just very short, but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil … They don’t look for an end to their misery, but simply change the reason for it.” Seneca

“If you do a good job where someone tells you exactly what to do, he will find someone cheaper than you to do it.” Seth Godin

“There’s only one thing certain. That is one’s own inadequacy.” Franz Kafka

“If you can deny your talents, if you can conceal then from others or, even better, persuade yourself that they weren’t given to you, you’re off the hook.” Seth Godin

“To stand face to face with insecurity is still not to understand it. To understand it, you must not face it but be it.” Alan Watts

“In the case of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear - fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, or challenge, of annihilation.” Andre Lorde

“He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.” Muhammad Ali

Prolific failure is part of nature - a female salmon will lay anywhere from 1500 to 10,000 eggs at one time and only 10 of those eggs will spawn - and often necessary to find any kind of success. You have to try, to persist again and again until you achieve the desired result and then you must continue to persist because one success does not beget another.

“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” Mike Tyson

“Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passersby see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney.” Vincent Van Gogh

“What we choose not to do matters.” Seth Godin on the harm of inaction

“One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.” Marie Curie in a letter to her brother

“There is more than one solution to your problem (and your problem is real) … Falling in love with your solution makes it incredibly difficult to see its flaws, to negotiate with people who don’t agree with you, to find an even better solution … The dissatisfaction of inefficiency or wrong direction isn’t going to go away merely because you deny it.” Seth Godin