Kathzoofus

 " When you don’t speak it, you store it. And that shit gets heavy. Release it. Let it go. Stop suffering in silence. Talk about what you’re going through so you can grow through it. It’s time to evolve." ~Nimai Delgado

 " Fear of failure is higher when you're not working on the problem. If you are taking action, you are less worried about failure because you realize you can influence the outcome." ~James Clear

" Unless we are very, very careful, we doom each other by holding onto images of one another based on preconceptions that are in turn based on indifference to what is other than ourselves. This indifference can be, in its extreme, a form of murder and seems to me a rather common phenomenon. We claim autonomy for ourselves and forget that in so doing we can fall into the tyranny of defining other people as we would like them to be. By focusing on what we choose to acknowledge in them, we impose an insidious control on them. I notice that I have to pay careful attention in order to listen to others with an openness that allows them to be as they are, or as they think themselves to be. The shutters of my mind habitually flip open and click shut, and these little snaps form into patterns I arrange for myself. The opposite of this inattention is love, is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery." Anne Truitt

"Life will present you with unexpected opportunities, and you won't always know in advance which are the important moments. Above all, it's the quality of your relationships that will determine the quality of your life. Invest in your connections, even those that seem inconsequential. " Esther Perel, Therapist

"I've learned one thing: you only really get to know a person after a fight. Only then can you judge their true character!" Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

"Optimism is usually defined as a belief that things will go well. But that's incomplete. Sensible optimism is a belief that the odds are in your favor, and over time things will balance out to a good outcome even if what happens in between is filled with misery. And in fact you   know   it will be filled with misery. You can be optimistic that the long-term growth trajectory is up and to the right, but equally sure that the road between now and then is filled with landmines, and always will be. Those two things are not mutually exclusive." He also writes: "Optimism and pessimism can coexist. If you look hard enough you’ll see them next to each other in virtually every successful company and successful career. They seem like opposites, but they work together to keep everything in balance." Morgan Housel in The Psychology of Money

"I'd always thought negative emotions were a sign of weakness and linked them to failure and self-judgment. Coach's comment, though, showed me negative feelings could have a positive reasoning: My disappointment was rooted in a desire to be better.  My place wasn't what mattered to Coach. What mattered was my commitment." From the book "Let Your Mind Run: A Memoir of Thinking My Way to Victory", by Deena Kastor & Michelle Hamilton

"A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push." ~Ludwig Wittgenstein

"We are made for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away." Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.1

I found via James Clear, author of Atomic Habits. It is from author  Michael Lewis  on the stories we tell ourselves: "As I’ve gotten older—I would say starting in my mid-to-late 20s—I could not help but notice the effect on people of the stories they told about themselves. If you listen to people, if you just sit and listen, you’ll find that there are patterns in the way they talk about themselves. There’s the kind of person who is always the victim in any story that they tell. Always on the receiving end of some injustice. There's the person who’s always kind of the hero of every story they tell. There's the smart person; they delivered the clever put down there. There are lots of versions of this, and you’ve got to be very careful about how you tell these stories because it starts to become you. You are—in the way you craft your narrative—kind of crafting your character. And so I did at some point decide, “I am going to adopt self-consciously as my narrative, th...

"Remember it's not striving to be the best that produces change but self-knowledge and awareness. Don't try to change your reactions today. It is enough to see them more clearly." My daily EnneaThought from The Enneagram Institute . If you are interested in learning more, check out their website and buy the book, Wisdom of the Enneagram .

“Hoard food and it rots. Hoard money and you rot. Hoard power and the nation rots.” ―  Chuck Palahniuk ,  Adjustment Day

"Physical exertion is mostly an act of mental strength." ~Ed Latimore

"Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder." ~Rumi

"Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone." ~Alan Watts

"[Love] is a verb. It’s an active engagement with all kinds of feelings—positive ones and primitive ones and loathsome ones. But it’s a very active verb. And it’s often surprising how it can kind of ebb and flow. It’s like the moon. We think it’s disappeared, and suddenly it shows up again. It’s not a permanent state of enthusiasm." ~Esther Perel

"Needless commitments are more wasteful than needless possessions. Possessions can be ignored, but commitments are a recurring debt that must be paid for with your time and attention." ~James Clear

"Our brains are wired for connection, but trauma rewires them for protection. That's why healthy relationships are difficult for wounded people." ~Ryan North

"Optimism is not about providing a recipe for self-deception. The world can be a horrible, cruel place, and at the same time it can be wonderful and abundant. These are both truths. There is not a halfway point; there is only choosing which truth to put in your personal foreground." -- Lee Ross, as quoted by Sonja Lyubormirsky in "The How of Happiness".

"At the higher levels of competitive swimming, something like an inversion of attitude takes place. The very features of the sport that the 'C' swimmer finds unpleasant, the top level swimmer enjoys. What others see as boring—swimming back and forth over a black line for two hours, say—they find peaceful, even meditative, often challenging, or therapeutic. They enjoy hard practices, look forward to difficult competitions, try to set difficult goals. Coming into the 5:30 A.M. practices at Mission Viejo, many of the swimmers were lively, laughing, talking, enjoying themselves, perhaps appreciating the fact that most people would positively hate doing it. It is incorrect to believe that top athletes suffer great sacrifices to achieve their goals. Often, they don’t see what they do as sacrificial at all. They like it.” ~Daniel Chambliss