Books, highlights & reading momentum

“Life is lived only in the present moment; the past and future have meaning only through purpose.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“A life has worth simply by existing; by existing, one already provides psychological comfort to those who love them.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Human value is unconditional and not earned through achievement.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Anger is not uncontrollable emotion but a tool used to dominate or control others.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Appreciation and encouragement focus on effort and contribution and preserve horizontal relationships.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Praise is judgment from above and creates vertical relationships, reinforcing dependence and a sense of lacking ability.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Vertical relationships are based on superiority and inferiority; healthy relationships are horizontal and equal.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Work stress exists only inside the limited sphere of work; step outside the cup and the storm loses its force.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Problems become a storm in a teacup when viewed only within a narrow life-space.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Recognition-seeking traps life in comparison; contribution does not require acknowledgment.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“True belonging does not come from being special, but from being useful.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Seek larger communities — country, Earth, universe — rather than clinging to small, easily exited communities.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Community feeling (Gemeinschaftsgefühl) is the sense of contributing to others and is the foundation of happiness.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“The courage to be happy is the courage to be ordinary.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Feelings of inferiority are universal and necessary for growth; inferiority complexes are chosen as excuses to avoid responsibility.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“There is freedom in not needing to be liked by everyone. To live freely is to accept being disliked.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Interfering in others’ tasks creates control and resentment; living to meet others’ expectations means abandoning one’s own life.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Separation of tasks means distinguishing my thoughts, emotions, actions, and choices from the evaluations, feelings, and responses of others.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“All problems are interpersonal relationship problems. Suffering does not arise from events themselves, but from relationships, comparison, and how one positions oneself among others.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“In the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them—those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can never focus enough to learn.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

““Just as a well-filled day brings blessed sleep, so a well-employed life brings a blessed death.””

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Second, you must convince yourself of the following: people get the mind and quality of brain that they deserve through their actions in life.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“The greatest mistake you can make in the initial months of your apprenticeship is to imagine that you have to get attention, impress people, and prove yourself.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“The great danger is that we give in to feelings of boredom, impatience, fear, and confusion. We stop observing and learning. The process comes to a halt.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“First, it is essential that you begin with one skill that you can master, and that serves as a foundation for acquiring others. You must avoid at all cost the idea that you can manage learning several skills at a time. You need to develop your powers of concentration, and understand that trying to multitask will be the death of the process.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“The principle is simple and must be engraved deeply in your mind: the goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good position, a title, or a diploma, but rather the transformation of your mind and character—the first transformation on the way to mastery.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“You must understand the following: In order to master a field, you must love the subject and feel a profound connection to it. Your interest must transcend the field itself and border on the religious.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Real pleasure comes from overcoming challenges, feeling confidence in your abilities, gaining fluency in skills, and experiencing the power this brings. You develop patience. Boredom no longer signals the need for distraction, but rather the need for new challenges to conquer.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Our levels of desire, patience, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than sheer reasoning powers. Feeling motivated and energized, we can overcome almost anything. Feeling bored and restless, our minds shut off and we become increasingly passive.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“The technologies we use to try to “get on top of everything” always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the “everything” of which we’re trying to get on top.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“The fundamental problem is that this attitude toward time sets up a rigged game in which it’s impossible ever to feel as though you’re doing well enough. Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time—instead of just being time, you might say—it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally “out of the way.””

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Historians call this way of living “task orientation,” because the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves, rather than from being lined up against an abstract timeline, the approach that has become second nature for us today.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.””

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem—or so I hope to convince you—is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise—to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“The poet had wasted his night while others had spent it enjoying themselves and now he realised that it was lost forever. He only had to lift his head up from the lamp and look at the sky to see that the night had gone beyond return. Waiters were hurriedly jerking the cloths off the tables. The cats pacing the verandah had a morning look about them. Day broke inexorably over the poet.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“HOW SAD, YE gods, how sad the world is at evening, how mysterious the mists over the swamps. You will know it when you have wandered astray in those mists, when you have suffered greatly before dying, when you have walked through the world carrying an unbearable burden. You know it too when you are weary and ready to leave this earth without regret; its mists, its swamps and its rivers; ready to give yourself into the arms of death with a light heart, knowing that death alone can comfort you.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Intelligent people, however, become intelligent by solving complicated problems.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“The threesome was walking towards Patriarch’s Street, the cat trotting along on its hind legs. As he set off after the villains Ivan realised at once that it was going to be very hard to catch them up. In a flash the three of them were across the street and on the Spiridonovka. Ivan quickened his pace, but the distance between him and his quarry grew no less.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“‘You should never ask anyone for anything. Never—and especially from those who are more powerful than yourself. They will make the offer and they will give of their own accord.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“‘Love leaped up out at us like a murderer jumping out of a dark alley. It shocked us both—the shock of a stroke of lightning, the shock of a flick-knife.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“‘Among other things I said,’ continued the prisoner, ‘that all power is a form of violence exercised over people and that the time will come when there will be no rule by Caesar nor any other form of rule. Man will pass into the kingdom of truth and justice where no sort of power will be needed.’”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“‘Of course man is mortal, but that’s only half the problem. The trouble is that mortality sometimes comes to him so suddenly! And he cannot even say what he will be doing this evening.’”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“‘I always think, present company excepted of course, that there’s something unpleasant lurking in people who avoid drinking, gambling, table-talk and pretty women. People like that are either sick or secretly hate their fellow-men.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“‘There is not one oriental religion,’ said Berlioz, ‘in which an immaculate virgin does not bring a god into the world. And the Christians, lacking any originality, invented their Jesus in exactly the same way. In fact he never lived at all. That’s where the stress has got to lie.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Priorities are the things you need to get right so the things you love can thrive.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Happiness is the natural state for most people whenever they feel healthy, have flexible schedules, and expect the future to be good.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Quality is not an independent force in the universe; it depends on what you choose as your frame of reference.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“Recapping the happiness formula: Eat right. Get enough sleep. Imagine an incredible future (even if you don’t believe it). Work toward a flexible schedule. Do things you can steadily improve at. Help others (if you’ve already helped yourself). Reduce daily decisions to routine.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“I’m here to tell you that the primary culprit in your bad moods is a deficit in one of the big five: flexible schedule, imagination, sleep, diet, and exercise.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“The most important form of selfishness involves spending time on your fitness, eating right, pursuing your career, and still spending quality time with your family and friends.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“You already know that when your energy is right you perform better at everything you do, including school, work, sports, and even your personal life. Energy is good. Passion is bullshit.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“A great strategy for success in life is to become good at something, anything, and let that feeling propel you to new and better victories. Success can be habit-forming.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main metric: my energy. I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-29

“In my book, it’s a crime to put things in detention so that we can justify throwing them away. To set them aside is to let ourselves hang on to things that don’t bring us joy. There are only two choices: keep it or chuck it. And if you’re going to keep it, make sure to take care of it.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-25

“know complaining is actually proof that a person still has the energy to carry on.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-25

“while some items we assume don’t spark joy actually do, sometimes the lack of that spark represents our own inner voice. This shows how deep the bond is between us and our possessions.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-25

“the things we need definitely make our lives happier. Therefore, we should treat them as things that bring us joy. Through this process, we learn to accurately identify even those items that are purely utilitarian as things that bring us joy.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-25

“Clutter accumulates when you fail to return objects to their designated place. If a room becomes cluttered “before you know it,” it is entirely your own doing. In other words, tidying up means confronting yourself.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2025-12-25

“Our things form a part of us, and when they’re gone, they leave behind them eternal memories. As long as I face my belongings sincerely and keep only those that I love, as long as I cherish them while they are with me and consciously seek to make my time with them as precious as possible, every day will be filled with warmth and joy. This knowledge makes my heart feel so much lighter. Therefore, I urge you once again: finish putting your things in order as soon as you can, so that you can spend the rest of your life surrounded by the people and things that you love most.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“Those who enjoy their tidying marathon win. As long as you acquire a firm grasp of the basics, then go ahead and make your own decisions, guided by what brings you joy.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“And if others in the family tidy even a little bit, praise, don’t criticize them. Tidying is naturally contagious, but if you try to force it on someone else, you’ll only be met with harsh resistance.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“If people have a clearly defined area in which they are free to do as they want, they will automatically at least keep their things from encroaching on anyone else’s space. If personal space is not clearly delineated in this way, people will lose track of the limitations of the storage spaces and their things will accumulate, making it hard for both people and things to enjoy the home.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“You don’t have to make yourself like someone else’s things. It’s enough just to be able to accept them.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“I have learned from my clients that what really brings joy to our lives is savoring daily life, instead of taking it for granted.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“Our relationships with other people are reflected in our relationships with our things, and likewise our relationships with things show up in our relationships with people.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“if the air flow feels heavy, it’s quite likely that the closets are stuffed to bursting. In fact, air circulation is an important consideration when tidying”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“The main purpose of a greeting card, however, is to convey a greeting. The moment you finish reading it, its job is done. Keep only those that truly spark joy.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“the essence of the storage process is to appreciate the things you own and to strive to make your relationship with them as special as possible.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“Some of the items hanging in your closet may have been very expensive, which could make you reluctant to get rid of them. This, however, is precisely the time to apply the joy check even more seriously. If it doesn’t spark joy when you hold it, yet you can’t bring yourself to discard it, try it on.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“the four principles: fold it, stand it upright, store in one spot, and divide your storage space into square compartments. These principles apply not only to storing clothes but to every other category as well.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“If you think that tidying up just means getting rid of clutter, you’re wrong. Always keep in mind that the true purpose is to find and keep the things you truly love, to display these proudly in your home, and to live a joyful life.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“No matter how messy your house may be, tidying deals with physical objects. No matter how much stuff you may own, the amount is always finite. If you can identify the things that bring you joy and decide where to keep them, the job of tidying must inevitably come to an end.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“Don’t throw away things that bring you joy simply because you aren’t using them. You could end up taking all the joy out of your home.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“When we do feel torn about something, there are three possible reasons: the item once brought us joy but has fulfilled its purpose; it does bring us joy but we don’t realize it; or we need to keep it regardless of whether or not it sparks joy.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“A simple design that puts you at ease, a high degree of functionality that makes life simpler, a sense of rightness, or the recognition that a possession is useful in our daily lives—these, too, indicate joy.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“Tidying up is far more than deciding what to keep and what to discard. Rather, it’s a priceless opportunity for learning, one that allows you to reassess and fine-tune your relationship with your possessions and to create the lifestyle that brings you the most joy.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“If you feel unsure about any piece of clothing, don’t just touch it; hug it. The difference in how your body responds when you press it against your heart can help you recognize if it sparks joy.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“The best way to identify what does or doesn’t bring you joy is to compare.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“Tidying deals with objects; cleaning deals with dirt. Both are aimed at making a room look clean, but tidying means moving objects and putting them away, while cleaning means wiping and sweeping away dirt.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“Remember that you are not choosing what to discard but rather what to keep.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“The criterion for deciding what to keep and what to discard is whether or not something sparks joy.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20

“Only two skills are necessary to successfully put your house in order: the ability to keep what sparks joy and chuck the rest, and the ability to decide where to keep each thing you choose and always put it back in its place.”

Untitled · Readwise · 2021-08-20