2024: The Best of What I Read

By / / Freedom, Lists, Power
An illustration of a figure reading a book with heart-shaped locks on its cover, sitting on a cozy armchair. The book unlocks inspiration, symbolized by a thought bubble with an exclamation point. Accompanying the blog post, 2024: The Best of What I Read.
The Art of Seth - the book.

I didn’t set out to find answers this year, but some books had other plans. These are the best passages I read in 2024 — just fragments, ideas, and turns of phrase that stuck in my mind.

 

The Laws of Human Nature, Robert Greene

 

  1. In a world full of people who seem largely interchangeable, you cannot be replaced. You are one of a kind. Your combination of skills and experience is not replicable. That represents true freedom and the ultimate power we humans can possess.

 

The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman

 

  1. When accused of “intellectual suicide,” Billy Graham answered: “I know I just believe. I just know what belief, without question, without reserve, has let God do in my life.…I have decided to believe.”
  1. We fall in love on few occasions in a long life. It is a rare and fortuitous event, and it strikes incredibly deeply. When such love happens, it is for no other reason than the singularity of the object. Only this person. Not attributes and virtues, not voice or hips or bank account, not projections left over from earlier flames or hand-me-down family patterns, simply the uniqueness of this person whom the heart’s eye selected. Without that sense of fate in the choice, the romance of the love doesn’t work. For this sort of love is not a personal relationship or a genetic epistasis, but more likely a daimonic inheritance, a gift and curse from the invisible ancestors.

 

Love and Living, Thomas Merton

 

  1. The world is more real in proportion as the people in it are able to be more fully and more humanly alive: that is to say, better able to make a lucid and conscious use of their freedom. Basically, this freedom must consist first of all in the capacity to choose their own lives, to find themselves on the deepest possible level. A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here or there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of “choice” when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses. It is not free because it is unwilling to face the risk of self-discovery.
  1. The monks of the Middle Ages, and the clerks too, believed that the inner paradise was the ultimate ground of freedom in man’s heart. To find it one had to travel, as Augustine had said, not with steps, but with yearnings. The journey was from man’s “fallen” condition, in which he was not free not to be untrue to himself, to that original freedom in which, made in the image and likeness of God, he was no longer able to be untrue to himself.
  1. Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone—we find it with another. We do not discover the secret of our lives merely by study and calculation in our own isolated meditations. The meaning of our life is a secret that has to be revealed to us in love, by the one we love. And if this love is unreal, the secret will not be found, the meaning will never reveal itself, the message will never be decoded. At best, we will receive a scrambled and partial message, one that will deceive and confuse us. We will never be fully real until we let ourselves fall in love—either with another human person or with God.
  1. To love you have to climb out of the cradle, where everything is “getting,” and grow up to the maturity of giving, without concern for getting anything special in return. Love is not a deal, it is a sacrifice. It is not marketing, it is a form of worship.

 

The Book of Awakening, Mark Nepo

 

  1. We are each faced with the endless and repeatable task of discovering, or uncovering, our enthusiasm, which means in essence being at one with the energy of God or the Divine. Despite our endless limitations, it seems that the qualities of attention, risk, and compassion allow us to be at one with the energy of the Whole and the result is enthusiasm, that deep sensation of Oneness. As such, enthusiasm is not a mood that can be willed or forced. Rather, it is the ripple that follows the stone. It can only be felt after we immerse ourselves in life.
  1. Forgiveness has deeper rewards than excusing someone for how they have hurt us. The deeper healing comes in the exchange of our resentments for inner freedom.
  1. I worked for years covering over sore lesions of esteem with agitations of accomplishment, till my heart was covered over with a thicket of achievements. Only when I put the achievements aside did the light begin to move. Only then did a Universal warmth reach my sore center. Only when I let the dark energies rest did I begin to heal.

 

The School of Life: Quotes to Live By, The School of Life.

 

  1. When we are around small children who frustrate us, we don’t declare them evil; we find less alarming ways of interpreting the origins of their difficult behavior: perhaps they are getting a bit tired, their gums are sore or they are upset by the arrival of a younger sibling. Given how immature every adult necessarily remains, the moves we execute with relative ease around children must forever continue to be relevant when dealing with another so-called grown-up.
  1. Anyone who has ever suffered from mental illness and who recovers will do so because of an experience of love, whether they consciously realize it or not. By extension, no one has ever fallen gravely mentally ill without – somewhere along the line – having suffered from a severe deficit of love. Love turns out to be the guiding strand running through the onset of, and recovery from, our worst episodes of mental unwellness.
  1. In a better world, our most serious goal would not be to locate one special lover with whom to replace all other humans, but to put our intelligence and energy into identifying and nurturing a circle of true friends.
  1. Marriage isn’t a vow to stop being interested in other people; it’s a commitment as to how to handle that interest.

 

The Seat of the Soul, Gary Zukov

 

  1. Each choice of fear—anger, jealousy, vengefulness—is a choice to evolve unconsciously through the painful, destructive consequences that fear creates. Each choice of love—gratitude, patience, appreciation—is a choice to evolve consciously through the healthy, constructive consequences that love creates. Why not choose the conscious path, the path of joy?
  1. Psychology seeks to heal the personality without recognizing the force of the soul that lies behind the configuration and experiences of the personality, and, therefore, also cannot heal at the level of the soul.
  1. Anything we fear to lose—a home, a car, an attractive body, an agile mind, a deep belief—is a symbol of external power. What we fear is an increase in our vulnerability. This results from seeing power as external.
  1. Every intention sets energy into motion whether you are conscious of it or not. You create in each moment. Each word that you speak carries consciousness—more than that, carries intelligence—and, therefore, is an intention that shapes Light.
  1. In order to make a responsible choice you must ask yourself, for each choice that you are considering, “What will this produce? Do I really want to create that? Am I ready to accept all of the consequences of this choice?” Project yourself into the probable future that will unfold with each choice that you are considering.

 

 
 

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