AN OVERLAPPING COMPANION to the sections “Living” and “Self,” the quotes I've put here on well-being tend to focus on physical, mental, and financial health. There are tips and thoughts on eating, drinking, crying, simplifying and slowing down, suffering, and handling money (or the lack thereof). There are some random bits of advice in the mix, as well as thoughts on advice itself.
Our bodies are apt to be our autobiographies.
We have so many words for states of mind, and so few words for the states of the body.
The great majority of us are
required to live a life of constant,
systematic duplicity. Your health is
bound to be affected if, day after
day, you say the opposite of what
you feel, if you grovel before what
you dislike, and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune.
The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison.
What you eat today walks and talks tomorrow.
Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. . . . Don't eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.
I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.
There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
Here's a rule I recommend. Never practice two vices at once.
I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature.
Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.
In wine, there is the truth.
The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth.
Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim.
Drunkenness is temporary suicide.
Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It's no coincidence we call them “deadlines.”
One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am—a reluctant enthusiast . . . a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure.
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence.
When you have grown still on purpose while everything around you is asking for chaos, you will find the doors between every room of the interior castle thrown open, the path home to your true love unobstructed after all.
Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are impermanent.
I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes.
You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.
The worst men often give the best advice.
I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice; had I abided by it I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes.
Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
The best way to keep one's word is not to give it.
Even when we say nothing our clothes are talking noisily to everyone who sees us, telling them who we are, where we come from, what we like to do in bed and a dozen other intimate things.
Talk to yourself like you would to someone you love.
Considering how dangerous everything is nothing is really very frightening.
I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life, and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.
Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.
Nothing is as bleak as it seems at the time.
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
The cure for pain is in the pain.
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.
There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.
Those who do not weep, do not see.
What soap is for the body, tears are for the soul.
Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before—more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.
Where can you scream? It's a serious question: where can you go in society and scream?
The things you own end up owning you.
—Chuck Palahniuk
In order to change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally, one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one's mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use.
Stop accumulating stuff, and start accumulating experiences.
Poverty is no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.
He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.
There are two ways to be rich: One is by acquiring much, and the other is by desiring little.
I think that luxury has nothing to do
with money, and everything to do with beauty.
When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.