Tim Ferriss Quotes

Happiness is threatening and misery is safe - safe for the ego. Ego can exist only in misery and through misery. Ego is an island surrounded by hell; happiness is threatening to the ego, to the very existence of the ego. Happiness rises like a sun and the ego disappears, evaporates like a dewdrop on the grass leaf.

Man (and woman) has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction. A human being may be clinically alive and yet, despite all appearances, spiritually dead.

The ego is your enemy, not your friend. It is the ego that gives you wounds and hurts you. It is the ego that makes you violent, angry, jealous, competitive. It is the ego that is continuously comparing and feeling miserable.

I think it's the ego in us that screws us up.

Learning is to discover that something is possible. We are using most of our energies for self-destructiv e games, self-preventing games. We prevent ourselves from growing the very moment something unpleasant, something painful comes up. At that moment we become phobic, we run away, we desensitize ourselves. Neurotic suffering is suffering in imagination, suffering in fantasy.

Ego is one of the biggest weapons that is used to take us down. It's self-destructive. It's a problem on all levels - even regular people can have big ego problems.

The self is hateful.

I think we all carry the seeds of our own destruction. You really have to be aware that just because something is good, it doesn't mean it's not going to trigger a self-destructive impulse.

You've got to know what your 'thing' is, and you've got to call it a 'thing,' whether it's meanness, nastiness, un-forgiveness, arrogance, ego, resistance, rebelliousness or defiance. Everybody's got a 'thing,' and once you call your 'thing' a 'thing,' we can give it a place to be or dismiss it.

People let their own hang-ups become the obstacles between them and personal happiness.

To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts.

I wonder if I will ever have the strength to hold onto something. Or if I will always be someone who destroys.

There's another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. [...] For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That's what hate does.

He who hates himself is not humble.

I know that you cannot hate other people without hating yourself.

Resolution is struggle. Resolution is ego. Resolution is saying, "I cannot live spontaneously. ".

The issue is that if you hold onto the resentment against yourself, you're just going to recreate that destructive pattern in different forms because unconsciously it's still a belief system that limits you.

If you have been wise and successful I congratulate you. Unless you are unable to forget how successful you have been, then I pity you.

If you allow your mind to carp at all and sundry, it will turn against itself: the majority of our sorrows are self-inflicted.

In everything we do, the serpent ego is rising up.

Complaining is one of the ego's favorite strategies for strengthening itself.

If your beliefs are stressful and you question them, you come to see that they aren't true - whereas prior to questioning, you absolutely believe them. How can you live in joy when you're believing thoughts that bring on sadness, frustration, anger, alienation, and loneliness?

Man's will creates the things that paralyze his brain and brutalize his heart.

Every single human being is trying his best. We're all doing the best we can. But when we believe what we think, we have to live out those thoughts. When there's chaos in our heads, there's chaos in our lives. When there's hurt in our thinking, there's hurt in our lives. Love thy neighbor as thyself? I always have. When I hated me, I hated you. That's how it works. If I hate someone, I'm mistaking them for me, and solutions remain hidden.

No truly conscious human being sabotages himself - it's impossible, because it's contrary to Nature.