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The Comfort Book

Book by Matt Haig · 16 quotes · Hope, Depression, Emotions

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The Comfort Book Quotes

“When he wrote Meditations, Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the world. He had, quite literally, a whole empire at his disposal. Cities, armies, palaces. All were his. He spent over a decade, from the year 161 to 180, as Roman emperor during the 'Golden Age'. And yet he resisted seeking any contentment in his status and power, in favour of simplicity, consultation and a cosmic perspective. He believed watching the stars was important and talks about Pythagoras - the early Greek philosopher and founder of Pythagoreanism - as his influence here. The Pythagoreans saw gazing up at the sky not just as a pleasant thing to do, but an insight into a divine order. Because stars are all separate, but all together in an order. For the Stoics, looking at them was looking at unveiled glimpses of divinity - and also fragments of Nature. It is not just the sky or the stars, then, that are important, but what we think when we look at them. Our connection to the shifting world around and above us. 'The universe is change', wrote Marcus Aurelius. 'Our life is what our thoughts make it.' Even a man in charge of an empire could look at the stars and feel happily small in the grand universal order of things. The sky doesn't start above us. There is no starting point for sky. We live in the sky.”

UniverseStarsStoicismNight SkyMarcus AureliusCosmic PerspectiveThe Stoics
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“It is good to be weird. It is good to be eccentric. It is good to be separate from the crowd. The philosopher John Stuart Mill thought it was almost a civic duty to be eccentric, to break the tyranny of conformity and custom. But even if we don’t feel outwardly eccentric, we all have eccentric parts. Thoughts that crop up on the peripheries of our thinking. Random sparks we can set alight. Thoughts that offer the other point of view or the other side of a political argument. Thoughts that don’t quite fit in with our other thoughts. Tastes that go against our other tastes. And as we grow older it is good to keep tending to those unconventional parts of ourselves—the thoughts that buck the trend—because these are the parts that will keep us new and capable of surprise. They will stop us becoming a cover version of ourselves. They will help us become new songs.”

GrowthBe YourselfWeird
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“Your worth is you. Your worth is your presence. Your worth is right there. Your worth isn't something you earn. Your worth isn't something you buy. Your worth isn't something you gain through status on popularity or stomach crunches or having a really chic kitchen. Your worth is your existence. You were born with worth, as all babies are, and that worth doesn't disappear simply because you have grown a little older. You are a human, being.”

InspirationalYouWorth
Book:The Comfort Book
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