Keeping Some Things To Yourself Quotes

Nothing matters. You get yourself into a state in which you imagine things which have no basis in reality ... One begins for some reason to worry about something and, if one allows oneself to go on doing that, one gradually imagines all kinds of things. It is a kind of self-indulgence and one gets into a perpetual daydream. It is essential to stop this process and face the real world
which is never so bad as all that. ~ Leonard Woolf

You are in front of your brother, but your mind is on many other things, so you don't really see your brother. Maybe he is having some trouble, but you don't see it, not even when you share the same room. But mindfulness brings you there, to the present, and then you see. Train yourself all day long to bring your mind to your body and to be present with your food, your friends, your work, everything, because the more you concentrate, the deeper you will see. ~ Chan Khong

Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery. ~ Stephen Dunn

You are tepid if you carry out listlessly and reluctantly those things that have to do with our Lord; if deliberately or 'shrewdly' you look for some way of lessening your duties; if you think only of yourself and your comfort; ~ Francis Fernandez-Carvajal

You have eyes like a mermaid," he murmured. "Soft, pale green. Beautiful."
"I knew it was only a matter of time before you walked in during my bath," Lara said, trying to sound calm although her heart was pounding. "Your request to see me in that negligee made it quite evident that you're a shameless voyeur."
Hunter grinned. "I've been found out, it seems. But you can't blame me for it."
"Why not?"
"After more than a year of sexual deprivation, a man has to have some pleasure."
"You could expend your energy on something more productive," Lara suggested as he came closer to the bath. "Develop a hobby... collect something... take up chess or pugilism."
His eyes twinkled at her prim tone. "I do have a hobby, madam."
"Which is what?"
"Admiring you."
She shook her head with a reluctant smile. "If you weren't so annoying, my lord, you would almost be charming."
"If you weren't so beautiful, I wouldn't be annoying." He gave her an easy masculine grin. "But I plan to annoy you often, madam, and someday you'll like it." He took another step toward the tub. "Brace yourself- I'm coming closer."
Lara went rigid, thinking of covering herself, screaming, splashing him... but she did none of those things. She remained in the tub, stretched before him like a pagan sacrifice. Hunter made no obvious show of staring at her, but she knew that he took in every detail of her body as it shimmered beneath the scented water. ~ Lisa Kleypas

THE ONE THING YOU MUST DO

There is one thing in this world you must never forget to do. If you forget everything else and not this, there's nothing to worry about, but if you remember everything else and forget this, then you will have done nothing in your life.

It's as if a king has sent you to some country to do a task, and you perform a hundred other services, but not the one he sent you to do. So human being come to this world to do particular work. That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person. If you don't do it, it's as though a priceless Indian sword were used to slice rotten meat. It's a golden bowl being used to cook turnips, when one filing from the bowl could buy a hundred suitable pots. It's like a knife of the finest tempering nailed into a wall to hang things on.

You say, "But look, I'm using the dagger. It's not lying idle." Do you hear how ludicrous that sounds? For a penny an iron nail could be bought to serve for that. You say, "But I spend my energies on lofty enterprises. I study jurisprudence and philosophy and logic and astronomy and medicine and the rest." But consider why you do those things. They are all branches of yourself.

Remember the deep root of your being, the presence of your lord. Give yourself to the one who already owns your breath and your moments. If you don't, you will be like the man who takes a precious dagger and hammers it into his kitchen wall for a peg to hold his dipper g ~ Rumi

Everything's gonna go to shit eventually, Sam." She reaches out and plucks a loose thread off the front of my sweater. "I wish you'd stay away from us. Go somewhere safe. When it's over, maybe things could be different . . ."
I let loose with an incredulous laugh. "Ugh, seriously? That's, like, the kind of crap that Spider-Man tells Mary Jane when he's trying to break it off with her. Do you know how embarrassing it is to be talked to like I'm some superhero's girlfriend?"
Six laughs too, shaking her head. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it that way. I'm just realizing what a hypocrite I'm being. This is exactly the opposite of the advice I gave to John about Sarah."
"Maybe you're right and things are going to get bad," I say. "But that doesn't mean you should cut yourself off. Being all about the war all the time? That can't be good. Maybe you should spend like ninety-five percent of your time as Six and, uh, five percent with me, being Maren."
I didn't plan that little speech; Six's old human name just pops out. Her mouth opens a bit, but she doesn't say anything at first, the name catching her off guard.
"Maren," she whispers. "I'm not sure I even remember how to be her. ~ Pittacus Lore

There are thousands of agreements you have made with yourself, with other people, with your dream of life, with God, with society, with your parents, with your spouse, with your children. But the most important agreements are the ones you made with yourself. In these agreements you tell yourself who you are, what you feel, what you believe, and how to behave. The result is what you call your personality. In these agreements you say, "This is what i am; this is what I believe. I can do certain things, and some things I cannot do. This is reality; that is fantasy. This is possible; that is impossible." One single agreement is not such a problem. But we have many agreements that make us suffer, that make us fail in life. If you want to live a life of joy and fulfillment, you have to find the courage to break those agreements that are fear-based and claim your personal power. The agreements that come from fear require us to expend a lot of energy, but the agreements that come from love help us to conserve energy and even gain extra energy. ~ Miguel Ruiz

Can a better kind of fiction save the world? There's always some tiny hope (strange things do happen), but the answer is almost certainly no, it can't. There is some reasonable chance, however, that it could save your soul. If you're unhappy about the hatred that's been unleashed in your heart, you might try imagining what it's like to be the person who hates you; you might consider the possibility that you are, in fact, the Evil One yourself. ~ Jonathan Franzen

We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who's right and who's wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don't like about our associates or our society.
It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others ... Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself. Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground. ~ Pema Chodron

In the moments after she spoke I remember thinking that if she was in some way correct she was, however, not right. That of course life is random, a series of coincidences, etc., but that to live you must attempt to make sense of it, and that's what narrative's for. I believe this, people of a certain sensibility believe this. Mostly it's harmless. Though perhaps sometimes you find yourself doing things because you think the narrative arc calls for it, or because you've grown bored with your own plot, things you shouldn't do because they will, these things, hurt the other characters in your story, who are not characters after all, but people. But then people do evil often and with less elaborate justifications. ~ Miranda Popkey

However mean your life is, meet and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its doors as early in the spring. Cultivate property like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts ... Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul. ~ Henry David Thoreau

It is the individual who can and does make a difference even in this increasingly populous, complex world of ours. The individual can make things happen. It is the individual who can bring a tear to my eye and then cause me to take pen in hand. It is the individual who has acted or tried to act who will not only force a decision but also have a hand in shaping it. Whether acting in the legal, governmental, or private realm, one concerned and dedicated person can meaningful affect what some consider an uncaring world. So give freely of yourself always to your family, your friends, your community, and your country. The world will pay you back many times over. ~ Sandra Day O'Connor

People have to go through what they have to go through. I think in some cases you sort of bring things on yourself and that's what you want it to be than that's the way it is. ~ Bryan Adams

When you spend too much time battling your own
nature, the opposite happens: you deplete yourself. I've met too
many people living lives that didn't suit them - introverts with
frenetic social schedules and extroverts with jobs that required
them to sit in front of their computers for hours at a stretch.
We all have to do things that don't come naturally... some of the time. But it shouldn't be all the time. It shouldn't even be most of the time. ~ Susan Cain

I don't know. We have everything we need to be happy, but we're not happy. Something's missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I'd burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help."
"You're a hopeless romantic," said Faber. "It would be funny if it were not serious. It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the "parlour families" today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors, but are not. No, no, it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. ~ Ray Bradbury

One of the things I do take some pride in is that if you had never read an article about my life, if you knew nothing about me, except that my books were being set in front of you to read, and if you were to read those books in sequence, I don't think you would say to yourself, 'Oh my God, something terrible happened to this writer in 1989.' ~ Salman Rushdie

One fine day you decide to talk less and less about the things you care most about, and when you have to say something, it costs you an effort . . . You're good and sick of hearing yourself talk . . . you abridge . . . You give up … For thirty years you've been talking . . . You don't care about being right anymore. You even lose your desire to keep hold of the small place you'd reserved yourself among the pleasures of life . . . You're fed up … From that time on you're content to eat a little something, cadge a little warmth, and sleep as much as possible on the road to nowhere. To rekindle your interest, you'd have to think up some new grimaces to put on in the presence of others . . . But you no longer have the strength to renew your repertory. You stammer. Sure, you still look for excuses for hanging around with the boys, but death is there too, stinking, right beside you, it's there the whole time, less mysterious than a game of poker. The only thing you continue to value is petty regrets, like not finding time to run out to Bois-Colombes to see your uncle while he was still alive, the one whose little song died forever one afternoon in February. That horrible little regret is all we have left of life, we've vomited up the rest along the way, with a good deal of effort and misery. We're nothing now but an old lamppost with memories on a street where hardly anyone passes anymore. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

If I could go back to do some things over, I would in a heartbeat. But that ain't reality. It ain't life. You got to forgive yourself before you can move on. When you forgive yourself the regret gets lighter and lighter and you manage to keep going. ~ Joe Hart

I know that some people feel that cooking is time consuming, but cooking is an activity that you can do for yourself and you'll be in good condition to do all the other things that you want to do in your life for a very long time. ~ William Katt

Make for yourself a world you can believe in.
It sounds simple, I know. But it's not. Listen, there are a million worlds you could make for yourself. Everyone you know has a completely different one - the woman in 5G, that cab driver over there, you. Sure, there are overlaps, but only in the details. Some people make their worlds around what they think reality is like. They convince themselves that they had nothing to do with their worlds' creations or continuations. Some make their worlds without knowing it. Their universes are just sesame seeds and three-day weekends and dial tones and skinned knees and physics and driftwood and emerald earrings and books dropped in bathtubs and holes in guitars and plastic and empathy and hardwood and heavy water and high black stockings and the history of the Vikings and brass and obsolescence and burnt hair and collapsed souffles and the impossibility of not falling in love in an art museum with the person standing next to you looking at the same painting and all the other things that just happen and are. But you want to make for yourself a world that is deliberately and meticulously personalized. A theater for your life, if I could put it like that. Don't live an accident. Don't call a knife a knife. Live a life that has never been lived before, in which everything you experience is yours and only yours. Make accidents on purpose. Call a knife a name by which only you will recognize it. Now I'm not a very smart man, but I'm not a d ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Some things in life are just to complicated to explain in any language.'
Olga was absolutely right, Tsukuru thought as he sipped his wine. Not just to explain to others, but to explain to yourself. Force yourself to try to explain it, and you create lies. ~ Haruki Murakami

She cannot think of such things and still function, and she has needed to function, and she has never wanted to be one of those women who won't let their children eat raw cookie dough or wander a block down the street without a chaperone, and you have to manage the terror or you can never watch your child walk out the front door. And here they are where death is shoving its bloody snout in their faces, and she has not considered it, not really, because she has some vague idea of what she will unleash if she does, the great gaping chasm that will open up. That is what you do when you have a child, isn't it, open yourself up to unimaginable pain and then try to pretend away the possibilities. ~ Gin Phillips

Do not allow this day to pass as an ordinary day, a day that you forget you ever had because it's similar to the day before & the day before that. During this compulsory free time, tune into your inner intelligence, wisdom & guidance to become more motivated, focused & ultimately happier. Believe me these days can give you a complete new direction & purpose. Let you plunge into your inner darkness to discover hidden gems, buried treasures, more of your huge potential & extraordinary capabilities. Let you use these days to learn more about the things you are passionate about & have abilities to do. Let you also use these days in building yourself more healthy, fit & strong. Your mental, physical & spiritual wellness was always so important. Let you prioritize it now. No more of that "I will do when I have some free time" shit. You have plenty of it now . Let you create better paths & opportunities for yourself. Let you encourage & push yourself to use your time more wisely now than ever before. Stay Hopeful & Keep Loving Your Life & Your World! ~ Rajesh Goyal

Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else... Every act is an irrevocable selection and exclusion. Just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses… Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in you bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel from the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called "The Loves of the Triangles"; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular. This is certainly the case with all artistic creation, which is in some ways the most decisive example of pure will. The artist loves his lim ~ G.K. Chesterton

Inherent in being proactive and trying things and not waiting to be told what to do is the fact that you're going to fail, you're going to make mistakes, and you're probably going to piss people off. And if you're not pissing people off, if you don't have haters, if you're not putting yourself in a situation that has some risks associated with it, you're probably not going to realize your full potential. ~ Gina Bianchini

Practice Hesitating Less

Look for small ways to practice hesitating a little less than you usually would. Over time, this will help increase your psychological flexibility: You'll get better at choosing when you want to let a decision marinate vs. when you want to make a decision swiftly, take action, and move on. You'll start to learn from experience that you can move out of thinking mode more quickly without disastrous consequences. For example, if you tend to put off buying things that, in reality, would be a good investment, give yourself some criteria for making quicker decisions. You might commit to making decisions about purchases that are under $50 in less than 48 hours. Choose the level that suits your situation and preferences. ~ Alice Boyes

Ronan was waiting for her beyond the estate's guarded gate. From the looks of things, he had been waiting for some time. His horse was nosing brown grass as Ronan sat on a nearby boulder, throwing pebbles at the general's stone wall. When he saw Kestrel ride through the gate on Javelin, he flung his handful of rocks to the path. He remained sitting, elbows propped on his bended knees as he stared at her, his face pinched and white. He said, "I have half a mind to tear you down from your horse."
"You got my message, then."
"And rode instantly here, where guards told me that the lady of the house gave strict orders not to let anyone--even me--inside." His eyes raked over her, taking in the black fighting clothes. "I didn't believe it. I still don't believe it. After you vanished last night, everyone at the party was talking about the challenge, yet I was sure it was just a rumor started by Irex because of whatever has caused that ill will between you. Kestrel, how could you expose yourself like this?"
Her hands tightened around the reins. She thought about how, when she let go, her palms would smell like leather and sweat. She concentrated on imagining that scent. This was easier than paying heed to the sick feeling swimming inside her. She knew what Ronan was going to say.
She tried to deflect it. She tried to talk about the duel itself, which seemed straightforward next to her reasons for it. Lightly, she said, "No one seems to believe that I might win."Marie Rutkoski