10 Life Quotes That Will Change the Way You See The World Forever Why do we love life quotes so much? I think I have the answer. Life quotes have a way of piercing through the b.s. and noise surrounding us. Life quotes are the swords that cut the Gordian knots of noise and reveal the essence of life we know deep down but tend to forget. I’m a writer, which means I love quotes. But I also understand how simultaneously insightful and useless they can be. You can do one of two things with a quote — use it as inspirational fluff to post on Instagram or use the insight to change your life. The wisdom of quotes is extremely powerful when applied. I’ve collected quotes I come back to time and time again when my life isn’t aligned, I need a reminder, or simply want to reflect on the beauty of life itself. I could easily look up some quotes and slap them into a blog post. Instead, I’m only going to use quotes I can recall from memory, talk about how I’ve used them in my life, and provide ways for you to do the same. The Triviality Trap “We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.” — Charles Bukowski Big challenges don’t trip us up. Little petty annoyances cumulatively throw our lives off-balance. Office politics at work, your commute, errands, meaningless news, gossip, tiny bouts of envy, social media, so it goes. Think of how much time you spend on meaningful activities vs. the amount of time you spent letting life’s trivialities swallow you whole. You know what I love most about writing? I get to escape the noise. When I enter that flow state, I get to retreat from the chaos of life and do something that (to me at least) means something. I build my life around the ethos of increasing my meaningful time and decreasing the trivialities I have to deal with. Life isn’t always overtly tragic. Sometimes it’s tragic simply because you waste it and don’t realize that until it’s way too late. Which reminds me… Reverse This Equation “You are mortal in everything you fear and immortal in everything you desire” — Seneca You think you have time. You don’t. You’re afraid of death, yet you act like you have unlimited time to live. Humans are weird. We tend to reverse the useful truth to suit our egos. The useful truth I live by is the reverse of Seneca’s quote. I often find myself working like I’ll die tomorrow. This actually causes me to fear death less. I’m guessing that within a few years I’ll reach the point where I’d be okay if I died. Give me a few more books, milestones, moments of meaning, and memories with people I love. I’ll be good. Granted, I don’t want to die. But you fear death less the more fully you live in the present. Seneca also says “Life is long if you know how to use it.” I do what I love almost every day. Time feels like “house money” after I’ve done that. In your case, why not reverse the mortality equation? Why not live like you’ll die tomorrow? Because you’re afraid. It’s useless to be afraid of death because you can’t control when it happens. But you can control how you use your time right now.

Don’t Sit on the Sidelines, Do This Instead “If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.” — Nassim Taleb I spent a great deal of time talking about all the b.s. society feeds us. You’ve been conditioned and trained to feel helpless. Societies emerge to stifle the mobility of individuals out of necessity and people fall for it every day. They believe the news, which is about 99 percent propaganda. They blindly follow the status quo. We collectively allow these institutions to arbitrarily divide us even though we all more or less want the same things from life — love, family, joy, meaningful work, simple. More and more, I’m trying to remove the fluff from my writing and talk straight. My new book and my recent writing have been centered around the idea...