The Meaning of Life.

The only shortcut to success is being intelligent enough to see what doesn’t matter and only spending time on what does. There’s no better use of time than the hard thinking to discover an undertaking that is truly worthy of your time.

Knowledge is the raw series of facts and intelligence the interpretation of how they inter-relate.

Knowledgeable people are collectors — they collect a long series of bits of knowledge without any understanding of how those bits work together. Intelligence is the deeper understanding of inter-connection.

Stop distracting yourself from the thinking. The most important thing to do is to figure out what is the most important thing to do.

The man who thinks himself a fool has already started to become wise. Outright fools always think themselves wise, regardless of the dismal results they obtain.

There is the YOU which is experiencing. Then there is the YOU which is observing you experiencing. Spirituality is the process in which you slowly identify more with the sense of self that is “watching” rather than the one “doing”. Spirituality is just watching yourself.

A person too LOUD on the outside — a conversation is being avoided on the inside. A person too QUIET on the outside — a conversation is raging on the inside.

With each moment of shame that you experience, you take another step of growth toward greater emotional maturity. Your heart grows stronger after any instance in which you feel like you let yourself down.

The young scientist will work hard to ANSWER THE QUESTION. The old scientist will work hard to QUESTION THE ANSWER. Then a philosopher comes along to QUESTION THE QUESTION.

Introversion is simply an observation of self. Extroverts are the simpletons.

When you draw a tree, it is not the tree itself. When you have an idea of the truth, it is not the actual truth. Just as you can’t look directly at the sun, your mind cannot directly appreciate the truth entirely — you may know the hint of it, an aura of truth, its radiance.

The natural offspring of creativity is beauty.

When you indulge in your own sense of strain, you imply your own struggle. Indulge in such self-obstruction for too long and you’ll magnify it. The more you fight it, the more you feed it.

Should you try? Should you let-go? Make it happen or let it happen? The answer is to honour your general intention without lust for specific result. Make it happen by letting it happen. Keep the end in mind, without strangling it: let it breathe.

Only the still pond can reflect the beauty of the stars.

To be great, ponder. To be brilliant, experiment.

Timidity wins nothing. Yet humility is the grandfather of all virtues. Don’t let your humility turn into timidity, for hiding your true self from the world is how you fail at life.

The very best art is never even made, because so many great hearts are buried under a mind that doubts itself.

The quieter the mind, the more the heart can hear.

Outcomes are usually environment dependent. Sculpt the environment to elicit a desired outcome.

Effort negates its own intention. The only real power is effortless. Ease: the clear mark of mastery. Strain: an ugly stain of wantonness.

It’s the emptiness of a drum that offers the sound. It’s the hollowness of a flute that allows the melody. And so it’s always a vacant mind that extracts the answer.

Biting your tongue gives you peace. Speaking your tongue gives you dignity. A hero chooses dignity over peace.

Life is a process of trying to find enough belief in yourself to eventually get out of your own way.

How far you will go in life comes down to one thing: how you feel about yourself. Not how you want to feel about yourself, not how you pretend to feel, but how you really feel.

The only goals you’ll ever achieve are the ones that were intoxicating enough. Your goals should fill your heart with enthusiasm until it spills over into immediate action. If you notice that your enthusiasm seems to be falling short, take time to re-evaluate your goals and this time keep in mind that ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.

Take the path that invites the world to laugh at you. It’s a higher path — you’ll feel nakedly exposed traversing that ridge of self-truth. It’s the frightful ridge that leads to higher and higher rewards. All other paths lead you down to the very same boring valley of Mediocrity.

Respect the souls who attempt the supposed “impossible”, regardless of whether they ultimately meet with success or not. The outcome itself is wholly irrelevant — it’s their undaunted spirit alone which is worthy of admiration.

Joy arrives in your heart whenever you make any progress towards your purpose.

You don’t need the respect of men, but you do need the respect of yourself in order to keep on reaching higher. Weak people need others to encourage them. Strong people can encourage themselves.

A philosopher would rather lose the game to win wisdom than win the game and carry no greater wisdom into future games.

To wise eyes, those who try hard expose their state of lack. True capability entails minimal effort, exhibiting an overall air of indifference.

Failure is only permanent if you keep lying to yourself. Success is inevitable if you keep being honest with yourself.

How to be a loser? Spend maximum time on minimum outcomes.

Master failure. Give up sooner, so you can move on to something that works effortlessly.

Humility is so powerful because it’s the only way to stop deluding yourself.

Most of your pain in this life will be self-imposed. Most of this self-imposed pain is from lying to oneself. Most of this lying to self is essentially a denial of failure. The way to unimpeded progress is a consistent willingness to be honest with yourself.

To do great things, first you need to believe you can. God seems to have instituted some kind of simple mirror that merely reflects back your own self-image. You can’t fool the Great Mirror though — it reflects back the version of your self-image that is the most heartfelt.

The young soul tries to impress other people with their feats. The old soul only works to impress their innermost self with the realization of their own potential.

Mysticism is talking directly to the intelligence of nature. Mostly listening. Science is talking to ourselves, in a sequence of logic, about what nature might be. The scientist is talking to themselves like a crazy person. Note the poetic injustice in the fact that scientists are always calling the mystics crazy. Scientists do listen by experiment, so they aren’t completely without virtue.

When you look deeply into Nature, there is an Intelligence staring back at you. That’s the God I believe in.

Nature doesn’t lie. Nature is true. People do lie. People are usually fake. Ask yourself — when was the last time you saw Nature do something fake?

Humans simply make rules up as they go along and always proudly demand your compliance to these rules like the rules were decreed by a god.

This world is perfectly imperfect. It’s just right. So this optimized condition strongly suggests a design — and a design this finely tuned really does imply a highly intelligent designer. If you can’t see a “god” in a design this majestically rich and balanced, you truly are blind.

HEALTH & TIME. If you’ve got no time left, health is of no use to you. If you’ve got no health left, time is of no use to you. You need both. One without the other is perfectly useless.

The Great Intelligence of the universe can’t just send you an email, but it can send animals to alert you of an impending problem. Or send animals to offer confirmation at the exact moment that you’ve finally found the truth.

Life is a game of appreciation. You win points (strength) with each moment of appreciating the beauty of life.

I am in awe of Nature. And in a deep reverence of its creator. It’s a noble path to study nature and wonder of the intelligence that created it. All study is the study of nature because there’s nothing but nature.

The only “holy” church is no church at all — it’s the majesty of an open-air ceremony. A church that closes itself off from nature is insulated and hardly a “place of god” at all.

The only truth is nature. Man’s intellect is just a haphazard array of suppositions.

Most of what a man thinks, most of what a man does, most of what a man feels, is based on false assumption. Pure truth can only be perceived upon a total relinquishing of the many falsehoods of cultural indoctrination. Achieving such an untainted state of perception may be impossible to hold for more than a fleeting moment.

All art reaches toward God — only music touches.

Most people are so busy doing what they are told in the outer world that they never find some time to listen to themselves in the inner world. Music can help you “let-go” of the complex distractions of worldly life and spend some time in your internal world, which is where you may find new stores of spiritual inspiration to take back into your mundane life of physical reality.

Truth that can’t be explained by a simple analogy to music is likely no truth at all.

There’s no higher form of spiritual healing than the surrendering of your heart to music. Whether you play or listen, it doesn’t matter. Feel it, let go — that is the true way of the mystic.

Good music is the conjuring of some metaphysical power, both for those who play the music and those who listen. It’s an inner power that we still don’t understand after thousands of years of dancing, singing and being mesmerized by sound.

Music is philosophy that you can feel. It’s more than an emotion, or the telling of a story — it’s an opportunity to vicariously experience a state of being that would not normally arise within you of its own accord. All you need to enjoy this opportunity to experience the blessing of a foreign beauty is to keep your heart open and your mind out of the way.

Life is short. Play your inner music! Rid yourself of fear (the best you can) and let yourself out. You are the cage. You are the key. You would remain in the cage only out of fear.

The hard part is figuring out what is truly meaningful to you. The next hardest, the belief in yourself to become better at it than others. Once you’ve done that, rule out everything else except your chosen goal. Don’t listen to others when they call you “obsessed”. Finally, realize that the easiest way to persist is to make the process fun.

Success relies on you being honest with yourself. Failure relies on you continually lying to yourself. Opponents won’t ever fool you even half as much as you fool yourself.

You have a choice: to be liked by everyone, or to have self-respect. It’s one or the other.

Entrepreneurship rests on your level of intelligence being sufficient enough so that you may quickly recognise failure and move on to the next idea.

Most blessed is one who knows the treasure of everyday life: the beauty in the smallest things.