When I read something beautiful or helpful on the internet, I use this little clipper that’s attached to my browser to save it to Evernote.
Here are some things I’ve saved through the years:
If we’re fragile, if we’re finite, then what do we love? How do we be brave?—Kate Bowler
Only then (nearly out the door, so to speak) did I realize how unspeakably beautiful all of this was, how precisely engineered for our pleasure, and saw that I was on the brink of squandering a wondrous gift, the gift of being allowed, every day, to wander this vast sensual paradise, this grand marketplace lovingly stocked with every sublime thing.— George Saunders
Everything sucks at first. Very few things suck forever. You don’t train for a marathon by running a marathon over and over. You build up to it. Slowly…That’s how you overcome fear.—John Gorman
“Even if i’m setting myself up for failure, I think it’s worth trying to be a mother who delights in who her children are, in their knock-knock jokes and earnest questions. A mother who spends less time obsessing about what will happen, or what has happened, and more time reveling in what is. A mother who doesn’t fret over failings and slights, who realizes her worries and anxieties are just thoughts, the continuous chattering and judgement of a too busy mind. A mother who doesn’t worry so much about being bad or good but just recognizes that she’s both, and neither. A mother who does her best, and for whom that is good enough, even if, in the end, her best turns out to be, simply, not bad. ” ― Ayelet Waldman
Jane Austen threw out the plan for a well‑read regency‑era woman. Frank Lloyd Wright threw out the plan for a young architect of his time. Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Enrico Fermi, Lin‑Manuel Miranda, Martin Luther King, Marie Curie, Pablo Picasso, Toni Morrison, they all threw out the plan. The right answer was safe; the wrong answer, the one no one else came up with or followed or believed in, was transformational. Ah, you say to yourself sitting there, ‘I cannot expect to be Jane Austen or Frank Lloyd Wright,’ but what you can embrace is a life that feels like it belongs to you, not one made up of tiny fragments of the expectations of a society that, frankly, in most of its expectations, is not worthy of you. And that requires courage, not compliance; passion in lieu of simply plans. — Anna Quindlen to Washington University
My job is “just” to stay as open and as aligned with my soul as I possibly can, and let life and creativity get to work through me, without agenda, expectations or even hopes. It’s so powerful to write from that place, mentor from that place, create from that place of non-attachment. And when I do, when I can get out of my own way like that, it seems that the work that comes through is also what brings the most joy and meaning to others. It’s a delightful (and to the rational mind, annoying) paradox: The less we bother about the outcome of our work, the more powerful it becomes. So I do it for love. This is where entrepreneurship becomes a spiritual practice of the advanced kind: When we learn to do our work from a place of pure joy and generosity, and then to let it go.—Anna Lovind
It is possible to move through the drama of our lives without believing so earnestly in the character that we play. That we take ourselves so seriously, that we are so absurdly important in our own minds, is a problem for us. We feel justified in being annoyed with everything. We feel justified in denigrating ourselves or in feeling that we are more clever than other people. Self-importance hurts us, limiting us to the narrow world of our likes and dislikes. We end up bored to death with ourselves and our world. We end up never satisfied.—Pema Chodron
