the willingness to make small, incremental adjustments, to tolerate imperfection and bumpy progress, and not to throw in the towel in frustration the… - Oliver Burkeman

Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.

For a civilisation so fixated on achieving happiness, we seem remarkably incompetent at the task.

Each time you kiss your child goodnight, he contends, you should specifically consider the possibility that she might die tomorrow. This is jarring advice that might strike any parent as horrifying, but Epictetus is adamant: the practice will make you love her all the more, while simultaneously reducing the shock should that awful eventuality ever come to pass.