David Cain

Self-love is not how you feel about yourself. It’s what you do for yourself. You can only love yourself by doing, not thinking. Execute feats of love, feats of respect, for your own benefit.

If there’s one thing Friedrich Nietzsche did well, it’s obliterate feel-good beliefs people have about themselves.

I’m slowly learning that the best response to fear is curiosity.

We all want the same two things: to fulfill our desires and to avoid suffering. These two motivations, and the behavior they inspire, comprise the human condition. There is nobody on this earth with whom you don’t have at least those two things in common.

You can make millions by selling a great product to people who need it, but you make billions and trillions by conditioning an entire nation of people to react to every inconvenience, every whim, and every passing desire or fear by buying something.

At any given moment, any time, any day of your existence, you can look at your whole life as a vast collection of experiences, and recognize that all of it adds up exactly to who you’ve become today.

Love is bigger than you. To love someone is for their happiness to be the same as your own.

Since the only problem we ever have is the presence of unease in our moments — and not the absence of anything — happiness itself doesn’t really exist.

A lot of things seem to work for a while, but then wear off or have a different effect. Some things have conditional or circumstantial effects. But there are five simple things to do that I’ve found to be consistently, disproportionately helpful in moving towards a more fulfilling life.

The way you feel right now will never be felt again, at least not quite. Your mood right now, and all its nuances and complexities, is as unique as a fingerprint.

What I like about that phrase, “I hate the person who invented Mondays,” is that it reveals the absurdity of one of our very human habits.

Someone whose opinions change freely with experience is clearly someone who is not guided by dogma or the expectations of others, but instead by a clear internal compass of inquiry and honesty.

Attending to your body’s needs is a sensible first step to responding to a bad mood.

A true master won’t simply tell you what he thinks you should know. He’s too wise to say, “Always be patient,” and expect that it will make you a patient person. Instead, he’ll create a lesson that challenges you.

I’ve rehearsed long tangents of tricky conversations that never happened. I’ve even flow-charted intimidating phone calls in my head — if he says A I’ll say B, if he says C, I’ll say D.

Whenever I let the phrase “I wish” escape my mouth, all I really have to say is this: “I’m not happy with things the way they are. I would be happy if they were like this. So there.”

You certainly have superhuman powers if you have internet access, even if you have to walk to the library to get it.

Thought allows us to stack problems into completely unmanageable loads. In only a few minutes you can think of fifty things you have to do tomorrow, and in those dosages thoughts can overwhelm you.