I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real
adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.

Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well. — EPICTETUS

I haven’t had any adventures. Things have happened to me, events, incidents, anything you like. But not adventures. It isn’t a matter of words; I am beginning to understand. There is something I longed for more than all the rest - without realizing it properly. It wasn’t love, heaven forbid, nor glory, nor wealth. It was…anyway, I had imagined that at certain moments my life could take on a rare and precious quality. There was no need for extraordinary circumstances: all I asked for was a little order. There is nothing very splendid about my life at present: but now and then, for example when they played music in the cafés, I would l look back and say to myself: in the old days, in London, Meknés, Tokyo, I have known wonderful moments, I have had adventures. It is that which has been taken away from me now. I have just learnt, all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, that I have been lying to myself for ten years. Adventures are in books. And naturally, everything they tell you about in books can happen in real life, but not in the same way. It was to this way of happening that I attached so much importance.

Don’t wait for things to happen. Make them happen.

You don’t need mentors, you need action.

Seek not for events to happen as you wish but rather wish for events to happen as they do and your life will go smoothly.

Nobody accomplishes anything significant alone.

But nobody accomplishes anything significant by accident either. Just because you need others doesn't mean you can wait for others to make it happen.

You have to act as if you are a force of nature and try to bend the universe in your desired direction—while remaining pleasant and open to help along the way.

The trick is to have both parts — energy and action — working in unison: unless your energy is lined up properly with that which you desire, really desire, any action you take is going to require way more effort to get you where you want to go, if it gets you there at all.

My wish for an adventure with Yvette was a wish to be taken up to the skies, to be removed from the life I had – the dullness, the pointless tension, ‘the situation of the country’. It wasn’t a wish to be involved with people as trapped as myself.

Don't ask for things to happen as you would like them to, but wish them to happen as they actually do, and you will be all right.

I wanted adventures. I wanted to go up the Nung river to the heart of darkness in Cambodia. I wanted to ride out into a desert on camelback, sand and dunes in every direction, eat whole roasted lamb with my fingers. I wanted to kick snow off my boots in a Mafiya nightclub in Russia. I wanted to play with automatic weapons in Phnom Penh, recapture the past in a small oyster village in France, step into a seedy neon-lit pulqueria in rural Mexico. I wanted to run roadblocks in the middle of the night, blowing past angry militia with a handful of hurled Marlboro packs, experience fear, excitement, wonder. I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books. I wanted to see the world – and I wanted the world to be just like the movies

Don’t demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.

Tell me, why do you have to go and make things so complicated? I see the way you're acting like you're somebody else; get's me frustrated. Life's like this: You fall and you crawl and you break and you take what you get and you turn it into. Honestly, you promised me I'm never going to find you faking. No, no! No!