Stop comparing where you’re at with where everyone else is. It doesn’t move you farther ahead, improve your situation, or help you find peace. It just feeds your shame, fuels your feelings of inadequacy, and ultimately, it keeps you stuck. The reality is that there is no one correct path in life. Everyone has their own unique journey. A path that’s right for someone else won’t necessarily be a path that’s right for you. And that’s okay. Your journey isn’t right or wrong, or good or bad. It’s just different. Your life isn’t meant to look like anyone else’s because you aren’t like anyone else. You’re a person all your own with a unique set of goals, obstacles, dreams, and needs. So stop comparing, and start living. You may not have ended up where you intended to go. But trust, for once, that you have ended up where you needed to be. Trust that you are in the right place at the right time. Trust that your life is enough. Trust that you are enough.
(Source: internal-acceptance-movement)
7 Great American Writers on Writing (See the last two here: x)
We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; and quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. We are monkeys with money and guns.
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.
Ursula Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (via alltheladiesyouhate)
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I never understood that silly trope that runs frequent on this site that only those intelligent enough feel lonely, or sad, or depressed. If anything, I’ve seen that happiness and contentment are things so much more difficult to comprehend or grasp. Why else would our world’s greatest and most intelligent leaders (i.e. Dalai Lama) always advocate for these ideals?
(via dimisfit)
What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism. A compulsive tendency to overtip. An uxoriousness that their wives deservedly inspired. More than that, they both lived their lives ‘beautifully’—not in any Jamesian sense (where, besides, ferocious solvency would have been a prerequisite), but in the droll fortitude of their perseverance. They got the work done, with style
The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.
(Source: vanalyk)
Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
(Source: stonechimneys)
“I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms.I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.”
― Ralph Ellison
Happy Birthday Ralph Ellison!
The sign of intelligence is that you are constantly wondering. Idiots are always dead sure about every damn thing they are doing in their life.
(Source: seedeeply)
You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anybody.
(Source: iheartloons)
