What if we could live a completely meaningless life full of pleasure and devoid of pain? Would we not be happy? Something deep within tells us no.
Anxiety and depression are your friends. They tell you there is something undone that must be done, something you must do. They demand action.
Your legacy is not simply a matter of what you do but a matter of who you do it for.
If you wish to leave a legacy, the things you do cannot matter only to you.
What drives a teacher is never what lies behind. At the heart of teaching is hope, and hope looks forward.
A teacher casts his work into the wind, knowing not where it will be blown, in hopes that a seed will land somewhere it can take root and outlive the one who cast it.
The first thing we are given, life itself, is the privilege of all privileges. Whatever else life brings us, having it at all should fill us with humility and gratitude.
When everyone we know is a king or a queen, it is easy not to notice each other’s crowns, except when it benefits our self-pity or vanity to compare them.
Life is hard because it cannot last, because it must not last. Its very definition is that which lies tenuously between nonexistence and nonexistence.
We are terrified by this life because it is the only one we know we have, and it is dying from the moment it is birthed.
You exist to be cared for only to a point, and with a purpose: that one day you might care for others.
All fame is is being known by people you don’t know, and what’s so great about that?
No one appreciates anonymity as much as those who have lost it, and you only get to lose it once.
Why do we so desire fame? Because we desire to matter.
Wealth and fame may be consequences of success, but they are not success itself. You want to be great? Great. Why?
Whatever you find yourself doing at any moment is the most important thing in the world to you at that moment.
Easy things do not call us to great action, because they are too easy to require great action.
Learn to mock your influence on the world or wait for the world to do it for you; you won’t have to wait long.
Sit around too long thinking about how to begin and you’ll consume all your provisions while your ship rots in the harbor.
Why leave the comfort of the harbor? Because you are a ship captain, and a ship captain sails.
To be called is to be drawn by something outside yourself, something bigger than yourself.
You may not have the power to do anything or everything you would like, but you do have the power to do something.
You can’t conjure up moments of clarity at will, but you can make a habit of quieting yourself and giving them the opportunity to occur.
An essential part of figuring out who you are is taking your eyes off yourself and seeing everything that is not you.
Forget yourself, and you may just find what you were made to be and do.
A lazy man often lacks the motivation to fight the very thing that has sapped him of his motivation.
A man long enough sedated may no longer even realize he’s being sedated, or want to.
Entertainment is often just a cheap way to quench our natural thirst for meaning by encouraging us to exercise passivity when we ought to act with passion.
Meaning is not found in passivity. You must track it down with fervent pursuit and fierce endurance. Meaning must be earned.
The best way to respond to a hero is to honor him, and the best way to honor a hero is to become a hero yourself.
You are not truly yourself until you no longer define yourself in others’ terms.
Courage is simply the commitment to do the right thing even when it is difficult.
A legacy, by definition, must matter to others, because a legacy is something you leave behind—you won’t be here anymore to think it’s important.
Not everything put into you is good or right, but it is good enough, and it is all important.
Once you know who you are, you need not fear being misunderstood, or isolated, or bullied. You won’t care whether others respect you, because you know who you are.
Life is a risk. Life is also punctuated by moments of great risk, and your identity and legacy are shaped by how you respond in those critical moments.
Failing to recognize moments of great risk is like dancing in the dark. You may be on solid ground, or you may be twirling at the verge of a precipice—you don’t know.
Your moments of great risk are not yours alone. The decisions you make in those moments are of great import to a great many people—people of great import to you.
You are not special, but you are unique.
An honest life starts with an honest assessment of self. You are neither worthless nor preeminent but somewhere in between.
Success and failure are derived not from anything you possess but rather by the things you do. Your successes and failures rest on your actions and your actions alone.
There is never the potential for success without a corresponding potential for failure.
You should neither attempt to justify a bad risk because it turned out well nor regret too much a good risk that turned out badly.
Perhaps the only thing we might legitimately lament in an old man’s death would be his failure to have used his time well.
Sometimes life’s most important moments begin with the casting of a seed, a small, uncertain act whose full significance becomes apparent only much later.
Life owes you nothing. It is a gift given without promises.
Don’t fear high expectations; embrace them. Choose to do hard things.
Goals are, by definition, linked to sacrifices. A goal is a focus, and one cannot have a focus without excluding that which is outside that focus.
Your life is one giant, continuous sacrifice being poured out on the altar of your choosing, moment by moment and day by day.
What discouraged me most from the goals of my youth were not my failures but my successes, that they proved so hollow.
If my family is the price of my success, then I am grateful to have had so little of it.
You may treat the past and future as realities, but they are only realities in your memory and imagination. Only the present exists.
With each passing moment, an infinity of potentialities become just one reality, your life narrowing with each tick of the clock.
Time: life’s inexorable weapon of humiliation.
Time spent under a burden is often time well spent.
The great lie of youth: that it will last.
The young never fully appreciate what they mean to the old until they are old.
Imagine living your life so indelibly that others remember your smile long after they’ve forgotten your name!
Each of us has only one life, unique from every other, and we all have reason to ask, “Why me?”, not in bitterness or despair but in awe and gratitude.
You may be appalled by your world, but you must be gratefully appalled.
Your life has come at the expense of a nearly infinite number of other potential lives that will now never get to be lived because you get to live.
Categorizing yourself by either your victimization or your privilege fails to give any clarity to life’s fundamental question: What are you going to do with it?
Wallowing in victimhood only demeans and paralyzes you. Don’t do it. Redeem it instead. Transcend it instead.
What right do I have to the blessings I’ve received? None. They are not a right—they are a gift.
A goal is not the same thing as a wish. A goal is something you work toward; a wish is something you hope will happen to you.
Wisdom is found in nature only by mining a lot of rock.
Worthy goals are always hard.
Your identity is formed in part by your past, but only in part, and not the most important part. Your past is merely a starting point.
Who are you? You are your aim. You are a seeker of whatever you seek.
Your aim is not just what you train your eye on; it is how you train your eye.
Only by making your legacy your aim can you summon the courage to act with conviction in the moment, whatever that moment may bring.
It is only when you can admit you may be wrong and are willing to grapple with uncomfortable ideas that you stand to grow.
Perhaps you are no rock climber, but faced with a big enough rock, you will have to become one.
Justice is a fickle mistress, alluring but elusive, ever delivering less than she promises.
Spend your life chasing justice and only one thing is certain: You will have spent your life.
Unspoken lessons are easily missed or misunderstood, and help unoffered is its own imposition.
When answering life's big questions, it doesn’t even matter what you say your answers are; what matters is what you do.
We will all be average in some things, above average in others, and below average in still others. But to aspire to be average is another thing entirely.
My best teachers showed me respect by refusing to share in my low expectations.
The alternative to a posture of humble gratitude is one of entitlement, which produces thanklessness toward your own blessings and envy toward the blessings of others.
When life is perpetually unfair in your favor, it is tempting to believe that you deserve it.
You and I enjoy a measure of freedom few have ever known, and it was not our blood that purchased it.
Our freedom is not a right we have won but a privilege conferred on us by those who sacrificed much that we might have it.
Once we’ve been victimized, none of us can choose not to have been victimized; we can only choose how to respond.
Never indulge your victimization by labeling yourself a victim, regardless of how much you deserve the title.
When you label yourself a victim, you compel those around you to pay homage to your victimhood. Don’t do that.
The only one who can give final assent to your victimhood is you.
Be grateful for pain. Don’t ignore it or deny it. Don’t anesthetize yourself from it. Swallow it and make it a part of you.
Only once you can truthfully say you are grateful for your victimization have you transcended it.
There are many injustices that will simply never be made right, and to expect otherwise is to set yourself up to be consumed by frustration.
To expect a hospitable world is hubris. Instead, expect the opposite. Expect a world that may destroy you at its whim at any moment.
Neither lion nor gazelle question whether it is just for the lion to catch and eat the gazelle or just for the gazelle to get away and let the lion starve.
Justice is the delusion of the self-entitled. To desire it is to desire a world that is not this world.
Whatever your world is, you are alive, and an incomprehensible number of things had to happen just the way they did for that to be the case.