It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” —Marcus Aurelius

People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy, but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

We are not ourselves when nature, being oppressed, commands the mind to suffer with the body - King Lear.

I can’t think of a sadder way to die than with the knowledge that I never showed up in this world as who I really am. I can’t think of a more graced way to die than with the knowledge that I showed up here as my true self, the best I knew how, able to engage life freely and lovingly because I had become fierce with reality. –Parker Palmer, On the Brink of Everything.

“Tolstoy says this thing in War and Peace that the higher up an organisation you go, the less freedom you really have. At the bottom, you can do whatever you feel like because it doesn’t make much difference, but at the top, if you’re Napoleon or the Tsar, the responsibility is so big you just have to do what the logic of the situation dictates.”