Cover artwork by Anton Biletskyi-Volokh, from an unpublished reusable sketchbook in progress.
A thematic selection of translated notebook fragments.
A realistic assessment of your limits gives you real freedom.
A healed wound frees up a great deal of strength for living.
Few things make us as unhappy as being fixated on happiness.
What is missing inside cannot be satisfied from outside, only anaesthetised for a while.
Anxiety means trying to prevent everything in the future while paying for it with the present.
Of all orientations, the main one is orientation in time, space and your own identity.
A reminder: a crisis is the most favourable time for personal development.
Remaining voluntarily isolated for a long time is a choice in favour of death out of fear of life.
Being fixated on finding arguments for your unhappiness prevents you from seeing opportunities to change your life.
Suffering gives us a sense of existing because it knocks out the other settings for the sensations life can offer.
The past is a suitcase: the more unnecessary things you pack into it, the harder it is to drag into the future.
The more our attention is occupied by unresolved questions from the past, the fewer resources remain for responding in the present.
I would like everybody to stop giving a damn about their problems and devote their whole lives to solving mine.
As a person lives, so is their life.
The shape of our everyday existence eventually becomes our fate.
Investing in something dead is a dead investment. Putting energy into something that is not viable will not make it viable.
Paradoxically, greed sometimes slows down grieving. We cannot bear to let go of the past, even a past that hurts like hell.
Our perception assembles reality from an endless flow of possibilities. The unconscious and our inner attitudes are the mould through which we create our lives.
Rejecting your past instead of integrating past experience into the present deprives you of support. Autobiographical memory does not like too many empty spaces.
Sometimes, while bargaining with the fact of inevitable death, a person gives up the joy of living. What is the point of rejoicing or enjoying anything if I am going to die anyway?
Often there is no harder road than looking for the quickest and easiest option. Hoping to get something for nothing means building your idea of life on survivorship bias.