I am driven by the yearning to learn how to live; how to lead a meaningful life; the fear of not having yet learned how to die. - Maria Popova

If you're not a little embarrassed of who you were and how you lived, perhaps the process of growth isn't quite working.

We suffer by wanting different things often at odds with one another, but we suffer even more by wanting to want different things.

But here’s the thing about self-comparison: In addition to making you vacate your own experience, your own soul, your own life, in its extreme it breeds resignation. If we constantly feel that there is something more to be had — something that’s available to those with a certain advantage in life, but which remains out of reach for us — we come to feel helpless. And the most toxic byproduct of this helpless resignation is cynicism — that terrible habit of mind and orientation of spirit in which, out of hopelessness for our own situation, we grow embittered about how things are and about what’s possible in the world. Cynicism is a poverty of curiosity and imagination and ambition.