A Quote by Jonathan Safran Foer
I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
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When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table. I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
While economic development [in Egypt] made a few people rich, it left many more worse off. As people felt less and less free, they also felt less and less provided for.
When something's wrong, even though you're the one doing it, you shouldn't feel defensive about it. It's hard because you have to protect yourself as a person in your life, but you can't protect yourself as an actor. You have to just take criticism.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Maybe you think you’ll be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesn’t work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. It’s by living that you live more. By waiting you wait more. Every waiting day makes your life a little less. Every lonely day makes you a little smaller. Every day you put off your life makes you less capable of living it.
It's funny: By putting up walls, you think you're protecting yourself, but you get to live less. You're depriving yourself of so much if you're trying to be too aware of what you're putting out there. If you feel someone breaking those walls down, let them. Those are the people that you need to find in life, rather than people that you're just comfortable with.
Without patience, we will learn less in life. We will see less. We will feel less. We will hear less. Ironically, rush and more usually mean less.
You set a goal to be the best and then you work hard every hour of every day, striving to reach that goal. If you allow yourself to settle for anything less than number one, you are cheating yourself.
Compassion is the intention to see each human being as no better or worse than yourself, neither more nor less important, and as fundamentally similar to yourself.
On your worst days do not look in the mirror and call yourself pretty. Call yourself trying, call yourself surviving, call yourself learning how to get through a day, a week, a month or year. Call yourself still learning.
Biggest lesson? Discovering that the less I think about myself and the more I think about what I can do for others, the more I get out of life. Ultimately, it makes me a happier person. You have to give it away if you want to get it back. After all, humility isn't thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life.
Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away.
In the pursuit of Knowledge, every day something is added. In the practice of the Way, every day something is dropped. Less and less do you need to force things, until finally you arrive at non-action. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.
If it would benefit you, I would kill every wolf here. But there are things that you need to do -- and interfering with that is not protecting, not in my book. The best way for me to protect you is to encourage you to be able to protect yourself.
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