Quotes by Angelos Michalopoulos

1

At the end of every day the truth of who we are brings us the bill to pay for every word we said and every action we did during it. When we pay it in full, we see dreams at night and when we don’t, we see nightmares....

2

Why be like lions living the life of cockroaches? We fail because the demands of greatness are huge and of failure, none. We are sad because the demands of happiness are great and of misery, none.

If we can become lions once in a while, why do we choose to live most of our lives like cockroaches? If we know what to do to be happier, why not do it more often? Why be like lions who choose to live like cockroaches? We live by throwing our strengths in the trash so that we won't feel compelled to give sweat, our sense of security and truth to become the person they can make us be. We are in danger. We are in danger of our mediocrity. We live by donating our strengths to our weaknesses. We donate them to the fear that comes with doing something intense that will result in a mistake, a defeat, and those weaknesses of ours that caused it. We praise what we want to avoid using, but often use heavily, what we don't particularly respect. We glorify light because we know how much more convenient and effortless it is to spend large parts of our lives hiding in the dark. If we can be happy, kind and creative people once in a while, why don’t we be so more often? If we can be, once in a while, as true as our truth and as strong as our strength, why don’t we do so more often? Why are we so willing to surrender to the horrible grey, the appalling fog of our handmade apathy, cowardice and mediocrity, waiting for life to come and show us how kind, humane, strong and capable we could be? If we know how to feel intensely, why do we choose to spend big parts of our lives immersed in apathy and its best friend, boredom? If we can be as kind as we need to feel happy once in a while, why do we choose to be so mean that we end up being miserable? If we know how happy we become by living to the max, why do we choose to spend most of our time hiding in the minimal? If we can do it occasionally, why not do it more often? We trust what we know, fear what we don’t and dread what we have intentionally left unknown. Self-knowledge is the mother of success and happiness. If we knew our weaknesses well enough to disarm them, we wouldn’t be afraid of them. We wouldn’t be afraid of doing something new, intense or extreme that would forcibly toss us onto our mistakes and defeats, that is, onto the truth of who we are, which our weaknesses are a great part of. Instead, we choose to spend a large part of our life hidden in the lies we use to convince ourselves that we have twice as many strengths and half as many weaknesses. When we get to discover our weaknesses, we will defeat the “once in a while" label we’ve installed in front of our brain and we will be able to be our best selves more often than we become our worst. So, let's stop covering up our weaknesses with the lies that we tell ourselves and let's start learning them. Let’s live our life exposing, as often as we can, the lies we’ve been telling ourselves for years, until we unmask those weaknesses of ours that produced them. When we get to know our weaknesses, we will stop being afraid of them, and will free ourselves enough to live our life to the max. We are lions that choose to live the biggest portion of our lives as cockroaches because the demands of greatness are huge and of failure, none.

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3

Thankfully, there will never be a shortage of people who want to build a world where a smile defeats a swearword, where the truth of a “yes” defeats the hypocrisy and dishonesty of a “maybe”, and where the compassion...

4

I will live by doing my best to be as honest as my soul, because every time I stood to be as real as my truth, as emotionally solid as my soul and as pure as my beliefs, I realised what it meant to be so in love with...

5

Beauty is born to defeat the sadness that ugliness produces.

6

Life is the celebration of beauty, but even more so, the celebration of an ugliness that was never born because it was explained. Every time we manage to explain to ourselves what makes us feel ugly, a celebration o...

7

The more we love, the less we fear. When we’re not afraid to love, we fear nothing.

8

Liars have all it takes to be sad because, by fearing the truth, they end up fearing their own soul that produces it.

Consequently, they choose to keep as far away from their soul as needed to never find their happiness that lives within her. Self-knowledge is the mother of happiness. People who become happy are those who, having told the truth to themselves, know their weaknesses as well as needed to disarm them before they block the road that leads to their happiness. There’s nothing our weaknesses want less than for us to be happy because this way, they keep us as weak as they need to defeat us. Self-knowledge is the mother of happiness because we trust what we know and fear what we don’t. Our choice is to either get to know our weaknesses better or forget about our happiness. Our biggest fear, our alpha fear, is the unknown we create out of everything we choose to never learn. It’s the fear that gives birth to all other fears and the source of our most undefinable sadness. We fear the unknown every time it dresses up as the darkness around us, or the future ahead of us, tearing into our lives to show and prove to us how much stronger and more determined than us it is. The one unknown we are most terrified of is the part of our character we have intentionally left unknown. We fear what we don’t know and that’s why we haven't stopped learning, ever since childhood, to overcome our fears, the ones anything unknown around us engender. The less we know about something, the more we fear it. We trust what we know, fear what we don’t, and dread what we’ve intentionally left unknown. The less we know about our weaknesses, the more we fear them, and the less confident we feel when dealing with any problem we face, which they create or magnify. As long as we choose to keep our weaknesses unknown, we live locked in a fortress contained by the fears of the unknown, blocked even from our own dreams and potential. We live in the fortress we’ve built from our knowledge, from all we have learned so far, seeing from afar the person we could become hugging our dreams and living freer and happier than us outside of it. Thankfully, we are much better than we think at defeating the things that want to make us miserable. We have many mental and emotional weapons and allies to defeat our weaknesses at our disposal and, by extension, defeat the misery they cause or magnify for us. To manage to do that, we should not be afraid to learn them as well as we need to disarm them before they lead us to the wrong decisions and the defeats that will fill us with sorrow, pain, disillusionment and low self-esteem. Max most apogee. If only we knew our weaknesses better, we would enjoy life more - since we wouldn’t be afraid that, by showing who we truly are, by feeling or doing something as intense as the truth we are made of, we might produce a defeat that would throw us against those weaknesses of ours that spawned it. If we knew our weaknesses better, we wouldn't be so afraid to get close to ourselves, close to our truth, by feeling more and thinking less. The power of our soul will become our power, only when we believe in her. The more we believe in our soul, the stronger we become. Happiness will go where truth already is.

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9

To protect ourselves from what we shouldn’t know, we live by learning a lot and forgetting even more.

10

We live surrendering our happiness to the unknown. To protect our delusions from the truth, and our ego from its next rendezvous with defeat, we continuously get better at producing the unknown by forgetting what we ...

11

We've made ignorance our favourite excuse for not living.

12

Nobody becomes happy accidentally. Happy are the people who don’t believe in their sadness.

13

We either create happiness out of truth, or sadness out of lies.

14

True people deserve the beauty of their soul and fake people - the ugliness of their sadness.

15

Our happiness is the cost of lying to ourselves and our loneliness - the cost of lying to others.

16

When we lie to ourselves, we invite other people to lie to us.

17

The huge, indecipherable cost of lying to ourselves is that we end up attracting those people we should keep away.

18

Every moment we live we either tell ourselves the truth and become as real as we need to be happy, or tell ourselves lies and become as fake as we need to be miserable.

19

Since happiness often has more truth in it that we can bear, we often choose, by not choosing, to be sad.

20

There is no lie that ultimately won’t cost more than the truth it was born to hide.

21

Life loves to remind us what we try the hardest to forget.

22

Life is a vast plain which, in seconds, can transform itself into an excruciatingly small cell.

23

The faster we run to escape the person we are, the harder we stumble on it.

24

Our sadness is the truth we never told ourselves.

25

We become as fake as we need to be to feel unhappy.

26

Life often likes to become an impossible choice between success and happiness which most often is won by the people who choose to defend their beliefs from the attacks of the next applause.

27

Silence is the hideout we use when we don’t know how else to avoid realising how much more truthful than us our words can be.

28

When we stop lying, we will become as strong as our truth.

29

We have more power than we know, as long as we can bear to live with the part of our truth it is made from.

30

We often lose after we win because truth creates power, and power creates victories that hate truth. Following a victory, winners are willing to believe the lies that people around them tell them more than the truth th...

31

Truth is the only thing in the world that humans will never defeat.

32

Since liars are afraid of the truth, they are afraid of their most truthful part, their soul as much as necessary to avoid feeling and become dispassionate enough to become miserable.

33

Our soul is our greatest source of strength, if only we stopped fearing her just because we’ve left her unknown.

34

Fake escapes lead to brand new prison cells and real ones to old freedoms. People who escape reality fall hard onto those weaknesses of theirs which imprisoned them in it.

35

The life of sad people is a permanent escape from the truth they don’t want to learn.

36

Wise are the people who realise the value of their every breath, even if they don’t realise anything else.

37

The hidden cost of greed is that, while waiting for the extraordinary, we miss the opportunity to enjoy the ordinary.

38

Every moment we refuse to live, we are rehearsing for our death.

39

We only deserve to enjoy those moments of our lives we respect.

40

We have one life to live, one life to enjoy, one life to create, and one life to fall in love with.

41

We belong to every breath of ours. We belong to every breath of ours more than they belongs to us.

42

Happiness is to live by constantly throwing in the garbage the person that the people around you want you to be and become who you really are.

43

We waste a large part of our lives trying to avoid discovering how incompetent we are at enjoying it.

44

The best way to relieve the pain of defeat is to become as good as we need to win.

45

Life doesn’t come with a manual. We have to write it ourselves, one mistake at a time.

46

It’s easier to go around the world than around our souls.

47

As long as we don’t learn our weaknesses, we will be the faithful employees of our sadness.

As long as we adore anything that keeps us at a safe distance from our weaknesses, especially those lies of ours with which we hide them, we will be working for our sadness. Let’s not capitulate, but let’s resist and not allow those weaknesses of ours, that give birth to and enlarge any problem and difficulty we face, to steal time from our own lives or a smile from our face. Let’s stop hiding behind the excuses and the lies we tell ourselves regarding the real reason we are miserable, and let’s understand why we are so keen on wasting large parts of our lives. Often, we decide to do the least possible and end up wasting our life, refusing to touch the joy, creativity, and happiness that its moments may have in them. We also avoid doing something that might throw us onto our weaknesses and the truth of who we are, of which they are its most painful part. Thus, we choose to waste our lives by refusing to live large parts of it. When we get to learn our weaknesses well enough to disarm them, we will not be afraid of doing something that might toss us onto them, for we are already aware of them. Thus, we will feel liberated to do anything we want instead of living imprisoned in the routine, repetition, of whatever feels safe for us. Learning our weaknesses will make us so self-confident that we will stop fearing to live our lives to the max. Thus, we will be able to enjoy our life and not spend large parts of it watching it disappear under our feet, unable to hold its moments in our hands, and try to turn it to happiness. We will manage to stop wasting our life and start enjoying ourselves to the max only when we stop fearing to do something new, different and intense that might possibly push us to the mistake, defeat, shame of who we are, and sadness our weakness produce for us. Let’s create a life out of smiles we’ve just discovered and not out of opportunities we’ve just missed. Let's create a life out of smiles we've found in places we never had the courage to look and not out of opportunities we’ve lost because we never found the courage to hope.

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48

Knowledge is the defeat of the unknown and self-knowledge, the defeat of sadness.

49

The most beautiful calmness is born when fear gets explained.

50

People who hate the reality they live in, because it has more truth in it than they would like, tell lies to escape from it and often end up becoming as fake as they need to feel unsuccessful and sad.

51

Life has two choices and countless excuses.

52

Life hates draws as much as we love them. There are no draws in life, other than the ones our lies invent.

53

We feel happy when we deserve our happiness.

54

Sweat + security + truth = happiness.

55

Victory by explanation. Strength is the explanation of weakness. Happiness is the explanation of sadness.

56

We live at the mercy of everything we leave unexplained.

57

As long as we choose not to learn our weaknesses, we will never discover all we can accomplish with our strengths.

58

Every time we tell the truth to ourselves, we honor the person we have the ability to be and every time we lie to ourselves we spit in their face.

59

Winners and happy people discover their strengths before their weaknesses discover them. The rest are doomed to keep on hunting and getting hunted.

60

We need most what we most lack.

61

The banner of any great battle is woven from those questions we never dared to ask our cowardice.

Revolutions often become the revelations of a well-hidden truth. That’s why my happiness lives in the answers I’ll give to the questions I never dared to ask my weaknesses. Our cowardice is often so much more powerful than us because it knows that we will never find the courage to ask it those questions that have the power to disarm it. Let’s stop fearing our weaknesses more than we trust our strengths. A revolution starts the moment long unanswered questions find their answer in the people who stop fearing their weaknesses more than they trust their strengths. A revolution starts the moment we find the courage to look in the eyes the part of our character that would prefer we remained slaves of our fears rather than search in the truth of who we are to find the freedom of becoming the people we dream of. We will realize the truth of who we are when we feel so real that we earn the right to become whoever we want to be. The time has come to raise the flag that will start the rebellion against the two handmade killers of my happiness - my weaknesses and the lies I tell myself. I will weave that flag out of all the moments in my life when I exposed them and explained to myself why I’m afraid of them. I will raise it and frontally attack every problem, every difficulty, and negativity I’m faced with, not to defeat it, but to understand and realise which weaknesses of mine gave birth to it. I want to live my life with my head held proudly up high, rebelling against the ugliest ugliness there is, the biggest tyrant, the most unjust, asymmetrical, and brutal enemy I will ever face, the one that hates me more than anyone else, and has harmed me the most: my weaknesses. The most important decision of our lives is waiting for us to decide. Let the revolution against our weaknesses begin and let's become the lifetime rebels against them.

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62

The last rebel in the world needs to revolt first.

63

Happiness is the revolution against ugliness.

Every moment, every day, is the right one to begin the revolution against our weaknesses. Every moment. Every hour. Every day! Happiness is the revolution against anything that wants to make us feel bad about who we are. I will never choose to retreat, refuse to fight against my weaknesses and let them fill my life with their favorite products: anger, ugliness, misery, and pain. On the contrary! I will set them up in front of me so that I can see them, and they can see me. I will set them up in front of me to remind me, to make me realize how much I lose when I let them defeat me, what the value is of every breath of mine, what the value is of every happy moment that, instead of living it, I give it to them to turn it into misery. I will set them up in front of me to remind me who I am and why I am fighting. The opposite of wrong is right. Instead of doing everything I can to hide them, I will do everything I can to reveal them. I want to see my opponent’s face, my worst self, my weaknesses, as I fight with them to remind me why I live, why I struggle to get better, which principles and ideals I fight for. Why live by letting them steal the happy moments I will experience without making the slightest attempt to stop them? What could be more valuable in my life than defending my happiness from anything and anyone that wants to make me miserable? The most important decision of our lives is waiting for us to decide. Let the revolution against our weaknesses begin and let's become the lifetime rebels against them.

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64

How useful are my strengths if I don't use them to defeat my weaknesses?

Strength is the disarming of weakness. It is time for me to become the rallying cry, the flag of the revolution against my weaknesses. If I really have the strengths that I don't stop advertising to everyone, and even more to myself, it is time to prove them by taking them in hand so that I can be as strong and as optimistic as I need to be to defeat the great enemy. Is there a greater ally in the battle against my weaknesses than my strengths? Why not finally discover the optimism that I have hidden in my beliefs for so many years so that I can start the battle against the greatest adversary I will ever face? Why not call all my strengths around me and ask them to help me learn my weaknesses? Who else but my most loyal ally should I call upon to help me fight my greatest enemy? I’m already sadder and more defeated than I would like. The time has come to fight for my own truth and stop filling myself with endless lies and delusions to feel bigger than my dimensions, more beautiful than my image, and more valuable than my self-worth. Instead, I will grab my beliefs in one hand and my truth in the other and I will fight, with everything I have, the two handmade killers of my happiness - my weaknesses and the lies I tell myself. If I want to defeat the most desolate darkness in the world, the darkness that only a human sorrow can produce, if I want to come out again into the light woven by any beauty around me, if I want to be happy, I have to fight those two bodyguards of my sorrow who are constantly on the alert, ready to defend it. I will probably lose more times than I will win, I might even kneel and be in pain, but I will never surrender. I will charge my biggest weaknesses, not to hit them, nor to try to humiliate them, but to embrace them and try to come closer to them, to try to get to know them as well as it takes to disarm them by explaining them to myself. I will defend my happiness against anyone and anything that wants to fill me with the desolate darkness of their sorrow. The most important decision of our lives is waiting for us to decide. Let the revolution against our weaknesses begin and let's become the lifetime rebels against them.

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65

As long as I live not facing my weaknesses but playing hide and seek with them, I will be too afraid to feel proud of who I am, too careful to feel free, and too cowardly to be happy.

The unknown doesn’t die when it is defeated, but when it is learned. Death of negativity by explanation. No matter how many times I defeat the unknown, if I don't learn it, it will always find a way to be reborn, to grow inside me until it becomes strong enough to defeat me. What is a life spent handcuffed by my weaknesses on my sorrow worth? I will break the shackles and set myself free, I will feel and live as intensely as I can, and if that means I might be doing something that disappoints my weaknesses, so be it. I prefer to disappoint my weaknesses and make my strengths feel proud of me rather than the other way around. The banner of the revolution that I will raise against my sorrow is woven from all the times in my life I choose not to lie to myself. Its every wave and ripple wants to fill me with strength, with self-confidence so that I can rise up and fight my sorrow. That’s why it’s so valuable to me. This is my battle cry. This is the first step of my revolt. My whole happiness lives in this step. It smells like revolution! It smells like revolution! How proud am I to see my pathos, optimism, and enthusiasm ridding every drop of my blood, every thought I have in my head, and running frantically all over my body to perpetuate the trumpet of victory and freedom! The message of freedom is heard. It is heard from one end of my world to the other. My pathos, optimism, and enthusiasm want to grab my laziness, defeatism, and pessimism and lift them to dance until they dazzle them with their frantic energy and determination so much to convince them to undress their ugliness and negativity. The most important decision of our lives is waiting for us to decide. Let the revolution against our weaknesses begin and let's become the lifetime rebels against them.

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66

Every moment I choose to defend my happiness from the attacks of my weaknesses and those of the people around me, I feel so proud of who I am that I feel I’m touching the meaning of my life.

Let's become the lifetime rebels against our weaknesses instead of being their voluntary prisoners. Let’s stop allowing them to imprison us in the part of our character that we deliberately keep unknown, just so we can have a great excuse for not trying to escape. The most suffocating jail cell in the world is the part of our self-knowledge we’ve deliberately left unknown. I have been a prisoner of my weaknesses for so many years, and now is the time to get to know them as well as needed to not let them catch me whenever they want to imprison me in the part of my character I have intentionally left unknown. I don't want to live as a fugitive from my weaknesses, a fugitive who is constantly running to slip out of their disgusting tentacles. Instead, I want to become the lifetime rebel against them. This is how my life will find its purpose and value. This is how I will touch its meaning. Why should I allow my weaknesses to paint grey what I see around me before I start seeing it? Why should I let them steal all the pleasure, vitality and joy of life from it, and fill it instead with negativity, defeatism, and their darkness before I feel it? I owe a debt to my body. For all that I ask my body to give me every day, I have to rebel against my weaknesses and the sorrow they cause me to try to give it the quality of life it deserves. I owe it to my body, I owe it to the good fortune of being healthy, to rebel against my weaknesses and against the sorrow they cause me, and enjoy every breath, every gift of life that it doesn't stop giving me. It does so much for me, while I have done little for it. The relationship we have with our body is the most asymmetric relationship we’ll have during our lifetime. We treat it so unfairly! The only defeat in my life that I will be ashamed of, if I don't give all I have to win, is to admit that my weaknesses are stronger than me and that I don't have enough courage in me to rebel against them. I am not ready to live the rest of my life without raising my head to resist, to do something to take away from them the disgusting power they exert on me. The most important decision of our lives is waiting for us to decide. Let the revolution against our weaknesses begin and let's become the lifetime rebels against them.

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67

Our worst enemies are the ones we manufacture ourselves.

68

Fight the problem you face, not yourself.

69

Weak are those who avoid realizing their weaknesses.

Strong are those who know their weaknesses and omnipotent those who realize them. What did we accomplish, for thousands of years, by fighting, each of us on our own, the greatest enemy of our happiness - our weaknesses that produce our sadness? Isn’t it time we spoke to each other about them? Isn’t it time we generated the kind breeze that will dissolve the fog of our own sadness, and that of the people close to us? We will get rid of our sadness when we find a way to disperse the emotional fog we produce on our own to avoid seeing the truth of which part of our character gives birth to it or magnifies it. Perhaps our individual sorrows share more common components than we recognize. What have we gained for thousands of years by shamelessly promoting our strengths to each other while refusing to talk about our weaknesses? When will we finally stop hiding our weaknesses and bring them out into the light, so that we disarm them before they attack our happiness? Our happiness lives imprisoned and heavily guarded by our weaknesses in the part of our soul we have left unknown. It lives there waiting in agony for us to find the will and courage to dive in to find and identify those weaknesses of ours which give birth to or magnify our misery. How much more happiness will we let our weaknesses stand against a wall and execute? Why should we continue to furtively fight our sadness individually, each one lost in our personal fog generated to avoid, not just seeing, but realizing those weaknesses of ours that caused it? Perhaps, if we talked to each other, connected with each other, with our words and emotions, and joined forces against our weaknesses - the most ruthless enemy we’ll ever face - we might be able to stand a chance to repel, restrain and prevent them from making us as ugly as they are. We are the shooting range where our weaknesses practice their talents. Every moment we live, we walk towards our future, knowing they wait in ambush for the time we don’t feel so confident about ourselves, to take us by surprise, attack and ambush us, one by one, filling us with the pain and sadness they are made of. What did we accomplish all these years by fighting them on our own, alone, and isolated? Not much. Not much at all. Maybe it’s time we joined forces and confided in each other about what we did to get to know ourselves and our weaknesses a little better. Let’s not stop until we’re able to help each other generate the benevolent breeze that will scatter the fogs we ourselves make out of the lies we tell to avoid realizing how much smaller we are than the false dimensions we have given ourselves. Perhaps, that way, we’ll be able to help each other get up from the canvas mat on which the endless blows of our weaknesses have thrown us until we find a way, together, to defeat them. The most important decision of our lives is waiting for us to decide. Let the revolution against our weaknesses begin and let's become the lifetime rebels against them.

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70

A battle can be won in thousands of different ways, but lost only by a handful, each one made or magnified by our weaknesses.

71

The most eternal defeat of humanity is that after thousands of years, we have managed to defeat everyone and everything, except for our weaknesses.

Humankind’s greatest failure is that we managed to defeat so many opponents except the most important one: our weaknesses. If not, why is there so much failure and misery on earth? Misery is the proof of our defeat in the battle with our weaknesses, while happiness is the proof of our victory against them. For thousands of years, we have chosen to do what’s easy and not what’s right, leaving the most difficult battle last. Knowing that it will be the most atrocious battle we will ever fight, for centuries we have bowed our heads, blaming others for what is wrong with us and continue, with mathematical precision, to postpone taking part in the one battle in our life we have to fight to start the one revolution we need to start. Is it finally time to stop postponing it? We’ll feel proud of who we are when we feel proud of who we can become. Maybe, after countless delays, it is time to believe in our beliefs, raise our heads, stop living by ignoring our weaknesses, and try to find out whether we can manage to disarm them before they choke our lives with their ugliness, failure and, misery. So let the revolution begin against the greatest dictator, the greatest tyrant in the world. Knowledge is half a victory and self-knowledge is a whole happiness. Happiness is the explanation of sadness. We will become brighter than our darkness and happier than our misery when we manage to learn our weaknesses enough to disarm them. Let’s stop fearing becoming brighter than our darkness just so we don’t antagonize our weaknesses that produce it. Let's become brighter than our darkness. Let's become stronger than our weaknesses. The most important decision of our lives is waiting for us to decide. Let the revolution against our weaknesses begin and let's become the lifetime rebels against them.

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72

For thousands of years, by lying to ourselves, we’ve hidden our weaknesses, and became so complex that we've ended up unhappy. Perhaps if we do the opposite, if we tell the truth to ourselves and try to learn our weak...

73

The most important battle of our lives is not to surrender the world we live in to the sadness our weaknesses produce and not to let the world’s weaknesses become our sadness.

74

The invisible battle that shapes the world more than any other, at any moment, is the battle against our weaknesses. Since it is easier to lose a battle than to win it, we end up losing the battle with our weaknesses ...

The invisible battle that shapes the world more than any other, at any moment, is the battle against our weaknesses. Since it is easier to lose a battle than to win it, we end up losing the battle with our weaknesses much more often than we win it. Thus, we end up filling the world with the pain and misery that this defeat causes us instead of enjoyment and happiness that a victory over them would bring.

Let’s join forces. What have we accomplished after all these years with each of us fighting our ugliness, our weaknesses, on our own? How much longer must we wait to realize that our ugliness, whatever its form - meanness, sadness, or rage - decimates us whenever it finds us alone? Our weaknesses’ greatest strength is our intentional indifference towards them, our constant running away from them, our refusal to join forces and unite as one fist, one decision, one fight against them. That’s their strength and that’s our weakness. That’s why, for thousands of years, our weaknesses have never stopped ambushing us and, every time they found us alone and weak, managed to annihilate us. Let’s combine the knowledge each one of us has amassed about our weaknesses until, out of the countless whispers that found a way to unite, the most beautiful sound in the world will be born. Let’s create our next courageous decision out of every step back we refuse to take in our life while facing our weaknesses. Let's create the next step forward from each time we managed to explain our weaknesses to ourselves before we allow them to become the preferred weapons of our pessimism. Let’s unite all the “maybes” which, disappointed by how little we believe in them, frantically trying to escape our lips, and use them to generate a resounding “yes” that will roar around our world, spreading the beauty and resolve of our soul. It is the beauty of our soul we dress up as pathos, enthusiasm, and optimism that we share with any soul around us that is ready to find the greatest barrier in her and place it in front of her owner’s misery. A smile has the courage to become the full stop that will stand in front of even the largest misery to prevent it from penetrating our lives and destroying our happiness even more. A smile that we believe in has the power to disarm a thousand sadnesses. The most important decision of our lives is waiting for us to decide. Let the revolution against our weaknesses begin and let's become the lifetime rebels against them.

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75

Happiness is a soul’s laughter. The most beautiful sound in the world is the sound of a person’s laughter who, having managed to disarm those weaknesses of theirs that produce their ugliness, found a way to feel beau...

Happiness is a soul’s laughter. The most beautiful sound in the world is the sound of a person’s laughter who, having managed to disarm those weaknesses of theirs that produce their ugliness, found a way to feel beautiful.

There’s no one our weaknesses hate more than us. There’s no one they want to hurt more than us. How many more fights are we willing to lose to our weaknesses? How much more hatred, agony, malice, guilt, and sadness are we going to let them fill our lives with? If for thousands of years, they've managed with such predictability to individually defeat us, the only thing left for us to do is to join forces and find a way to disarm them. The time has come for us to become our next right decision. The time has come for us to become one truth, one battle cry, one victory, not against any opponent, but against the most ruthless and savage enemy we will ever face. Whoever believes more in kindness than in meanness, more in humaneness than in bitterness, more in the truth of their pathos than the lies of their apathy, more in the power of their dreams than in the vacillating asterisks their cowardice endlessly fills their life with, and finally, more in the quest for the freedom a brave decision is made of rather than in the invisible jail cell built by the countless ‘no's’ they’ve told their optimism, it’s time to take a step forward and allow their soul to become one with the soul of others who feel the same. It’s time for us to stand tall against the desolate makers of our ugliness and prevent them from making us as miserable as they are. Whoever believes more in the powerful message of beauty hidden in the refusal of a hand to become a punch than in the humiliation a swearword thirsts to spawn, it’s time they took a step forward and join the strength, pathos, beliefs, and purity of their soul with that of other people who feel the same, so that we can all become as happy as the beauty of our soul and not as sad as her ugliness. The most important decision of our lives is waiting for us to decide. Let the revolution against our weaknesses begin and let's become the lifetime rebels against them.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

76

The hidden cost of education is that, by deifying logic for all the victories it can give us, we often become too logical to be happy.

77

Let’s live dancing with the bluest part of the sky instead of crying on the shoulders of the deepest spot of the abyss.

78

Let’s live by translating our soul’s beauty into happiness and not turning her ugliness into the pain and misery of the people around us.

79

If I want to be happy, I will have to allow myself to become more vulnerable than safe.

80

People who are afraid haven’t been anywhere, no matter how many places they’ve visited.

81

Let’s respect our happiness enough
to stop donating it to our problems.
People who live by throwing smiles into the darkness betray their optimism
enough to lose access to their own light.

Let’s stop living by throwing smiles into the darkness. Let’s stop donating our life to ugliness. People who keep donating their happiness to their problems feel as much like cowards as necessary to be miserable. Let’s stop allowing our problems to abduct us from our happiness and steal life from our lives. Let’s stop surrendering minutes, hours and entire days to the misery produced by our weaknesses. It’s those weaknesses of ours which, dressed as pessimism and defeatism, anxiously and impatiently load our words and deeds with anxiety and agony to kill any joy, creativity and happiness we are trying to fill our life with. We will never be given a chance to relive the time we wasted by allowing our weaknesses to immobilize us, to freeze us by filling us with stress, anxiety and a feeling of incompetence. Let’s not just feel sad about the defeats we suffer by the various problems and negativity we face, because, once they pass, we will have forgotten them, but we will have forever thrown away the time we wasted bemoaning them. Let’s resist negativity. Let's stop wasting time and happiness mourning the problems we face, and let's find out which weaknesses created or magnified them.
Pessimism does not solve problems, it just makes them bigger, making us feel like such losers and so weak that we feel unable to solve them. The tough times of our lives will prove to us how much more we believe in our beliefs than we are afraid of our weaknesses!
Our beliefs make us who we would like to be. Let us believe them.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

82

To rebel against our weaknesses
is the most important decision of our life.

It’s the one decision that can help us more than any other to achieve success and happiness. We owe our success to revolt against those weaknesses of ours that produce our failure. We owe our happiness to revolt against those weaknesses of ours that produce our sadness. The revolution against our weaknesses is so significant because it’s a rebellion against our biggest opponent and our only enemy, the one that hates us the most and has harmed us more than anything else during our lifetime. The rebellion against our weaknesses is the most important decision in our life because it’s a revolution against the biggest producer of our sadness. If we don’t rebel against the enemy that has caused us the most harm in our life, who are we going to rebel against? Which battle can be worth more than the battle of liberating ourselves from the pain of sorrow, by throwing away the shackles our weaknesses won’t stop making? Every time a person rebels against their weaknesses, a global rebellion against ugliness begins. Victory by explanation. Strength is the explanation of weakness. Happiness is the explanation of sadness. Strength is the explanation of what wants to makes us weak. Happiness is the explanation of what wants to make us sad. Instead of living our life passively, waiting for it to toss our weaknesses in our face whenever it wants, let’s rush at them. Not to attack them, but to get to know them as well as we need to to disarm them before they fill us with the mistakes, defeats, shame of who we are and sorrow they so efficiently keep on producing for us. A smile is born every moment we revolt against our weaknesses and a tear every time we bow our head to them and continue to let them make us as miserable as they are. The most important decision of our life
is waiting for us to decide.
Let the revolution against our weaknesses begin, and let us become lifetime rebels against them.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

83

We will enjoy our life
when we realize the uniqueness of its every moment.

84

We choose not to realize the uniqueness of every moment of our lives so as not to feel bad about failure to live it.

85

We are a society that,
by producing a lot more lies than it can consume lives closer to the next teardrop than the next smile.

86

Afraid are the people who can’t love.
As long as I love someone, I fear nobody.
I will live by fearing nothing,
not because I’m brave,
but because, by letting my soul free to love everything, I won’t feel th...

87

Happiness will go where truth already is.

I will live and feel as intensely as I can because only then will I be able to find in my words and deeds the truth of who I am, and with it, my happiness. Only then I will feel as strong as needed to liberate myself from the part of my character that wants to make me as mediocre, scared, pessimistic and cowardly as I need to feel sad. Why live just by trying a couple of bites of life, letting them just touch my palate and then spit them out? I want to drink in one gulp every moment I live and let it pierce me from end to end until it is grounded in the most sensitive, the most benevolent part of my soul, to make me feel it so strongly that I persuade it to forever become a part of who I am. I want to live a life during which I will keep on inviting every beautiful moment I find in front of me to dive into me and be grounded forever in my soul to become a permanent part of who I am, a part of my truth. I will not be disappointed every time reality, disguised as misfortune, defeat, difficulty, negativity or problems, tosses my weaknesses in my face to make me feel ashamed of who I am. I will look at them straight in the eyes and, I will not fight to avenge them for all the pain they have filled me with, but embrace them tightly until I get to know them as well as I can. I want to get to know them so well that I manage to disarm them, make them lose the authority they have over me and allow me to live freely, away from their enslaving shadow. I’ll never find again, I’ll never be able to reproduce or re-live, those moments I surrendered to negativity without a fight. I will live a life where, as often as I can, I will go where my soul and her truth already are.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

88

Seeing the ugliness, whatever form it takes - malice, misery, aggression, negativity - constantly defeating the happiness of the people around me and seeing how much useless misery is born in the world and how much usefu...

Seeing the ugliness, whatever form it takes - malice, misery, aggression, negativity - constantly defeating the happiness of the people around me and seeing how much useless misery is born in the world and how much useful happiness is wasted, I grabbed in my hand the most eager "why" I could find and started writing, in the chance that I can defeat ugliness by explaining it. I wanted to understand how we've become so good at being sad, how we've become so good at not only at abandoning the beauty of our soul but asking its ugliness to show the world around us who we are. Every time I struggled with the question of who gives birth to my misery, I stumbled upon my own weaknesses. By writing for others, I learned myself. Nothing is accidental, not even anything that seems to happen by accident. It is no coincidence that there is so much sadness in the world. It exists because, by choosing to do what is easy and not what is right, we don't try to learn our weaknesses as well as we should to prevent them from producing misery or magnifying the misery someone else's weaknesses have produced. The more I wrote, the more I realized the value of the truth we should tell ourselves in achieving our happiness. Maybe it's time to say no to the lies we tell ourselves and finally tell the truth. This way, we will build self-knowledge, become as self-sufficient as we need to disarm our weaknesses and become happy. Every time we tell the truth to ourselves, we create self-knowledge and every time we lie, we tear it down. We all want to be happy, but we aren’t willing to do everything needed to deserve our happiness. Happiness is the disarming of misery. How can we feel happy though, when we aren't willing to defend our happiness from the onslaught of the ugliness of the world around us? How do we want to live a happy life when we fill it with ugliness? That's what we need to change. CALILO. Create a life you can fall in love with. However, the more we praise change, the more we remain the same, because we know that change often has more truth in it than we can bear. That's why we love to hide in the routine so much. Life doesn't come with an instruction book. We have to write it ourselves, one mistake at a time. Self-knowledge is the mother of happiness. When we get to know ourselves, we will feel as strong as we need to be to disarm our weaknesses and therefore be able to create beauty by neutralizing the ugliness within us and the ugliness around us. In this way, we will be able to change our lives for the better. When we learn ourselves well enough to disarm our weaknesses, we will allow our strengths to make us as successful and happy as they can. We will therefore create a life that has as little ugliness as possible, a life that has so much beauty that we will want to fall in love with. Let's tell ourselves the truth in order to drive away the ugliness we have been producing for so many years with our lies. The lies we tell ourselves create ugliness, which in turn, leads to misery. On the contrary, truth creates beauty that leads to happiness. We all have beauty in our souls, as long as we aren't afraid of the truth from which it is made. Let's live by translating the beauty of our soul into happiness, and not by translating its ugliness into the pain and misery of the people around us. We will then be able to create a world that is as real as it needs to be to feel so beautiful that it overflows with happiness.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

89

Black clouds have an equal right to the sky as its blue does.

90

Fall asleep every night having fought everything that wants to make you mean as hard as you can,
while hugging as tightly as you can
everything that wants to make you as compassionate as you need to be happy.

Fall asleep every night having fought everything that wants to make you mean as hard as you can,
while hugging as tightly as you can
everything that wants to make you as compassionate as you need to be happy.

All I want to have in me the last moment of every day of my life is my soul overflowing with countless unused punches, punches I chose to never affix to my fists to hurt someone, along with countless silent swearwords. It’s those swearwords that, though I tried to fill my soul to the brim with my rage as fast as I could,
in the end, I decided to keep inside me
and not let out of my lips, so they wouldn’t become the pain and misery of the people around me, especially those I love. All I want to have in me on the last moment of every day of my life is the sweet echo left behind
by of all the carefree festivities and spontaneous celebrations spawned by the souls of the people who crossed my life
the moment they managed to connect with my own.
All I want to have in me on the last moment of every day of my life is every instant my kindness that managed to disarm my weaknesses, reach my malice
and hug it so hard that it made its suffering stop,
every moment the silky emotions of my soul
found a way to become a caress which wrapped my fist
until it stopped feeling the wretched need to attack anymore. All I want to have in me on the last moment of every day of my life
is every moment when a sunbeam born in my soul by a person’s love found the courage to kiss my personal darkness
until it convinced it to stop wanting to be so dark,
every instant the truth I’m made of
rushed to embrace the lie I was about to invent,
convincing it to stop hiding every part of my character from me
that wants to reward me and not punish me
for the person I have become. All I want to have in me on the last moment of every day of my life is every moment my joy found a way to explain to my sadness why it shouldn’t be as pessimistic as my cowardice,
every moment when the sublime aroma of the soul of every person I loved found the answers to the persistent questions the most sullied part of my own soul asked me, every moment their optimism and generosity managed to create something beautiful
out of the wreckage my meanness left behind while touring my world to promote
my most desperate but talented weaknesses. Lastly, all I want to have in me
on the last moment of every day of my life
is every hug and kiss of the people I loved
that found a way to run faster than my coldness
so that it could make the next moments of our common life look more like benevolent sunshine
than a destructive tempest.
This incredibly sweet echo,
which, through the years, found a way to mutate
from simple, ordinary memories into powerful emotions and eventually into the most beautiful colors of my soul
is all I want found in me on that moment.
That and nothing else.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

91

Be moderate to survive and extreme to enjoy.

92

Life is not a rehearsal, it’s the one and only show.

93

Every four seconds our body produces, out of our lungs, the greatest little gift one can give us:
the most incredible yet common miracle in the world, our whole life wrapped in a breath!

A breath is our whole life wrapped in a bit of air. A breath is the smallest- priceless life. A breath is another postponement of the ultimate zero, death, another wonderful opportunity to move aside the zero we ourselves allow our cowardice to make for us by refusing to enjoy, create and be happy. Every breath is a brand-new tiny life - a life we have never seen before, even if we had already experienced something similar in the past. Every four seconds our body gives us a brand-new gift we can use to fill our life, and that of the people around us, with as much compassion, kindness, festivity, joy, beauty and creativity we can! As much as we can, you hear? So, as long as our body keeps on giving us gifts wrapped in opportunities it has tucked into breaths, let’s do something about it, let’s reciprocate its generosity by creating as much beauty as we can for ourselves and the world around us. Maybe our most frequent invisible self-injury is our refusal to open the gift our body gives us in every breath, so we won’t live an experience that will push us to do something different, something intense that might show and prove to us the truth of who we are. It’s incredible how many invisible defeats we cause ourselves: we suffer every day of our lives for every visible defeat caused by others!
Why live by refusing to accept all the gifts our life wants to give us? Why live by throwing away its gifts before we even open them? Our body never stops giving us a gift every four seconds. However, we hesitate, feel afraid, and often accept them without even opening them to see what’s inside. Have we ever asked ourselves why we don’t feel grateful for all those gifts our body keeps giving us through the years? Let’s put aside those weaknesses of ours that make us so greedy that we end up being emotionally stingy, and so arrogant that we end up being miserable beggars for a few crumbs of happiness. We throw our own breaths into the garbage every time we, out of greed and arrogance, convince ourselves to ignore them because something more interesting and more valuable will be coming. Let’s open every gift our body gives us without giving it that arrogant look, without belittling it, without drowning it with those appalling asterisks of indifference we so often use to justify to ourselves why we were afraid, why we backed away and forgot to live it and translate it into smiles. Max Most Apogee. Let’s live our life feeling, enjoying and creating as intensely as we can. Why, out of the millions of breaths and gifts our body has given us to live, have we chosen to disregard and never even open to see what’s inside most of them? Let’s stop surrendering our life to our weaknesses by living in constant fear of doing something that is intense enough and true enough that it might lead us to a mistake, a defeat or those weaknesses of ours that caused it. We trust what we know, fear what we don’t and dread what we’ve intentionally left unknown. If we want to stop being afraid of the future, let us learn the person who will create it: ourself. This way, we will stop drowning in the dream and agony that the unknown produces inside us.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

94

Since happiness is our most valuable acquired good, then the factor that deprives us of it - our weaknesses - is the one adversary in the world that we must defeat before we can even begin to fight anyone else.

Since happiness is our most valuable acquired good, then the factor that deprives us of it - our weaknesses - is the one adversary in the world that we must defeat before we can even begin to fight anyone else.

Before we start fighting any opponent we find in front us, let us realize that we are already fighting the only enemy we have in the world: our weaknesses. Is there a higher cause that’s more important in our life than victory in the rebellion against our sadness and those weaknesses of ours that produce it? I don’t know if I’ll win, but I know that I will feel very proud if I spend every last drop of sweat, every last good idea in my mind, every last bit of emotional energy I have in my soul, to get to know my weaknesses as well as I need to prevent them from dominating me and destroying my happiness. I will do everything I can to know and understand my weaknesses. I don’t know if I’ll make it but, no matter how excited or disappointed I get on the way, I will never surrender to them. I will never surrender to the only enemy I have in the world. I will never surrender to my weaknesses which daily do their best to break me, locking me up in the invisible cell of pain they weave out of every moment I gutlessly lower my head, take a step back and refuse not only to fight them, but to even acknowledge them. I will learn them as well as I need to to turn them off and steal away their power to dominate me. On the contrary, I will find a way to make the rest of my life much better than what I lived so far. The opposite of wrong is right. If hiding my weaknesses has led me to misery, I will reveal them and get to know them as well as I need to disarm them, so that I can become happy. The most important decision of our life
is waiting for us to decide.
Let the revolution against our weaknesses begin and let us become lifetime rebels against them.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

95

Life often likes to become an impossible choice
between success and happiness.
Life often likes to become an impossible choice
between any victory and the greatest victory of all - happiness.

96

Castles fall from within.
No one can defeat us
if we are not weak enough to lose.
No one can make us sad
if we are not weak enough to feel miserable.

97

If success and happiness were free,
then all the people in the world
would be extremely successful and deliriously happy and failure and sadness
would have long disappeared
from the face of the earth.
Ther...

98

Start your souls! Start your souls and throw away the key so you will never turn them off again.

Max most apogee. Let's live, create, celebrate and feel as intensely as we can. Let’s live with our souls feeling the maximum, our arms wide open and our lips ready to grasp as much of our inner beauty as they can from the shyest, most vulnerable spots of our soul to transform it into the next smile of the people around us. Let's turn our souls on and let all their immense, indomitable pathos and enthusiasm produce the emotions with which they will paint the world around us with so much truth that they will make it rediscover where it hid its beauty. If we endure to be brave enough to let it come out, a soul’s truth can instantly become the most profound beauty in the world. 16 Every moment we enjoy life, we defeat ugliness by disarming our weaknesses, without even having to fight them. Every moment we enjoy life, we disarm everything that wishes to make us sad. Max most apogee. Let's get to know our weaknesses as well as needed to disarm them and allow our strengths to make us as strong and self–reliant as necessary for us to be happy. We will become our best selves when we disarm those weaknesses of ours which want us to become our worst self. Every excuse we use not to live our life to the max is no less than a death sentence we inflict upon ourselves. Let's set aside those fears that prevent us from finding out which weaknesses of ours hate our happiness most, and create a life that is so beautiful we will end up falling in love with. We will become strong when we disarm what makes us weak. We will be happy when we disarm what makes us sad.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

99

If success and happiness were free, then all the people in the world would be extremely successful and deliriously happy while failure and sadness would have long disappeared from the face of the earth. There is no free ...

100

Let us live producing beauty or celebrating the beauty others have produced.

I will ask the hearts of the people close to me to give me all the warm embraces they have hidden in their most beautiful emotions, before my logic lays its hands on them and turns them into cold, uninterested, stiff handshakes. I will also ask them to share with me all the joyful moments of their past which they chose to forget to avoid comparing them with their present and realize how much happier they were then. I will live by asking my logic to give back to the people close to me all the happiness and emotional sunshine I stole from their souls and any part of their beauty they didn’t manage to hide in time to save it from the attacks of my ugliness. Moreover, I will ask my logic to give back to me all the carefreeness my fear of living my life to the max convinced me to turn into cowardly apathy rather than courageous enthusiasm. I will live a life during which, whenever I can’t find enough emotional honesty in me to construct words with my lips and deeds with my fingertips that make me proud of who I am, I will celebrate the beauty created by the words and deeds of the people around me. I want to feel so emotionally honest that I find the courage to let my words and actions seek in the souls of the people around me that part of their beauty which will help me explain my ugliness to myself. Every moment we explain to ourselves what makes us feel ugly, we realize how much undiscovered beauty we still have in us.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

101

Every moment we enjoy life, we defeat the ugliness our weaknesses produce, without even having to fight them.

102

When logic hits the brakes, pleasure accelerates.

103

The most beautiful moments of our life are those when we feel so content and proud of the truth of who we are, that we no longer feel the slightest need to lie to ourselves.

104

Life is the art of managing the negative. Happiness is the proper management of misery. Victory is the proper management of defeat. Beauty is the proper management of ugliness. Strength is the proper management of weakne...

105

The only way to make sure our life is filled to the brim is to overflow it.

106

It’s often more profitable to become someone else, if you don’t mind the misery that comes from deserting who you are.

The real cost of truth is that we can’t become someone else without disowning who we are. My truth is my private Ithaca. No matter how far away I might temporarily wander from the truth of who I really am by lying to myself, my truth will be the private Ithaca that will always wait for me to return to it. The happiest moments of my life are those during which all my lies and delusions, seeing me feel as serene and as true as my truth, rush away from me in a panic, realizing that I will no longer be their favorite firing range where they can practice their ugliness whenever they feel like it. My life sees this and is moved to tears, because it realizes the value of these moments, and sets me free to fall in love with it. It sets me free to fall in love with any of its moments where I believed in my beliefs so much that I became so real that I couldn't be anything else but happy. I will believe in my beliefs until I feel so solid and so pure that I ask the people I love to allow their emotions to dive deep inside me to catch and take out all the beautiful words or deeds of mine that my lies never allowed me to even see, let alone touch. I will then ask the people I love to start painting the world around me with them, until I realize how much more I believe in beauty than in ugliness. CALILO. I will create a life I will fall in love with. Every person on Earth has their private Ithaca. We all have an Ithaca to return to because we need the truth of who we are to make us feel happy, more than we need our lies to make us feel successful. Happiness is the realization of how much more we believe in the kindness of beauty than in the malice of ugliness.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

107

Celebrate happiness and explain sadness. To enjoy life, let’s celebrate beauty by showering the people around us with our happiness and disarm ugliness by explaining our sadness to ourselves, until we’re not sad anymore....

108

We will defeat sadness, one explanation at a time. Every moment we manage to explain to ourselves the real reason why we are sad, we disarm another part of our sadness.

109

We’ll enjoy life when we celebrate as much as we can everything that wants to make it beautiful and disable as quickly as we can everything that wants to make it ugly.

110

We are only worthy of our dreams we give birth to as reality.

111

We live at the mercy of everything we leave unexplained.

112

Not only we will we not find our happiness in the misery we cause to those closest to us, but in it we will discover an even larger part of our own sadness. Often, it is a part of our own sadness which we never even knew...

113

Victory by explanation. Strength is the explanation of weakness. Happiness is the explanation of sadness.

114

The sky’s blue is made out of every cloud we refused to throw in it.

115

As long as we are not proud of ourselves enough to like who we are, we become our own Trojan horse that will open the gate for our opponents to invade us and shame us.

116

Either we say the truth or we lie and get hunted by the truth we refuse to say.

117

We lie to convince ourselves that we are already the person we will never succeed in becoming.

118

Being prisoners of our lies, we became the prison guards of our truth.

119

Truth is the ultimate beauty, no matter how ugly it seems to be.

120

Since truth loves black or white, happiness hates any version of gray which our lies invent.

121

With every truth we say to ourselves we defeat our sadness, and with every lie we help our sadness defeat us.

122

Truth is the most exquisite beauty. Truth is the most exquisite l beauty because it is born to defeat the ugliness in which our lies have drowned the world.

123

Genuine people use their truth to become happier, while fake ones are used by their lies to make themselves so artificial, they can’t be anything but miserable.

124

How can there not be so much sadness in the world when we trust our lies more than we trust our truth?

125

People who refuse to defend the truth of who they are, become as fake as needed to deserve their misery.

126

We stumble onto what we avoid. The more vague we try to be, the more life likes to force us to decide, define and explain who we are.

127

If we don’t know who we are, we will find it under the lies we’ve told ourselves to hide it. That's why the lies we tell ourselves know better than anyone the truth about who we are.

128

Let us stop making excuses that we can’t find out who we are. We will find out who we are, when we begin telling ourselves the truth so we can uncover all the lies we’ve been telling ourselves for years, under which we’v...

129

After years of lying to ourselves, we have become so fake and artificial that we've ended up knowing ourselves as little as needed to feel miserable.

130

Extreme self–confidence breeds either gigantic triumphs or shocking disasters, but nothing in between.

131

In our quest to look charming, we often become as fake as it takes to feel ugly.

132

We love doing the same thing because everything we do for the first time has the answer to every question we don’t dare ask ourselves.

133

We love routine because we hate those surprises that insist on teaching us the truth of how incompetent we are to deal with change.

134

No matter how much we praise strength, we avoid becoming strong to avoid doing anything that might push us toward our weaknesses.

135

Let us stop being afraid to celebrate our joy just to avoid waking up the misery of the people around us.

136

How can we be happy when we have turned our truth, the most loyal ally we have in the battle against our misery, into our greatest enemy?

The moment we become enemies of every part of our character that wants to make us feel beautiful, we become supporters of our ugliness, no matter how much we hate it. By becoming enemies of our most beautiful emotions, we become fans of our ugliest. Our enthusiasm and pathos are the laughter of our soul, the ambassadors of our alpha truth, the truth of who we are, to the world around us. These two never cease to offer pieces of our truth to the world around us. They explain to the people around us who we really are, effortlessly bypassing all the fake, cheap tricks we usually use to advertise ourselves and to charm everybody around us. From the many lies we have been telling ourselves for so many years we’ve become so fake that we fear the truth of our soul so much that we will do everything not to let it become excitement, enthusiasm and pathos which can reveal and explain to everyone who we really are, thus forcing us to discover it ourselves. Thus, we end up living by singing with our mouths closed. We have become so fake that we feel threatened by anything that is true, especially the most important truth of our lives, our alpha truth, the truth of who we are. We feel threatened by the truest, most spontaneous, honest, raw, natural means of expressing the truth of our soul, our enthusiasm and our pathos. We are afraid to show the truth of who we are to avoid being forced to exclusively use truth in the future. Who can bear to say only the truth? Only one who wants to be happy.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

137

We become the opposite of what we glorify.

138

We are the victims of our comfort. As long as we choose to do what is easy rather than what is right, we become victims of our comfort by making our life temporarily easy and eternally difficult.

139

Ease is the enemy of greatness. Ease is the enemy of happiness.

140

We choose to do what is easy to avoid facing our weaknesses, which doing what is right will almost always force us to confront.

141

People who choose the ease of lies over the discomfort of truth, make their life as fake as it needs to become difficult.

142

Happiness is born to break the barriers invented by sadness.

143

Miserable people hate happy ones even more than they hate their own misery.

144

Let's discover the blue of the sky before its gray discovers us. Let's learn our the truth about ourselves before our lies make us forget who we are. Let's conquer the peak before the abyss conquers us.

145

As long as we refuse to discover the real reason we are sad, we will be the defenders of our sadness.

146

Happy are the people who have reached a point in their lives where they don’t feel the slightest need to lie to themselves.

147

The heaviest burden in the world to carry are the five triumphs of our weaknesses: the lies, mistakes, defeats, the shame of who we are, and the misery we allow them to produce on our behalf.

148

If happiness had rules, it would be miserable.

149

Happiness is the only fortune that is so valuable, it cannot be measured.

150

The most beautiful happiness is one born to break the limits imposed on it by the sadness of the people around.

151

Our addiction to lies makes us dumber than our sadness.

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Smiles are born to help the tears find reasons to be happy.

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Let us be more careful with every word we say and every action we do, since we will end up living in the ugliness or the beauty we allow them to create on our behalf.

We become part of the canvas we paint every moment we live. We are part of the world we helped create. We paint each other’s souls with the emotions we feel at any given point, even while we try to convince ourselves that we don’t affect them at all, to avoid feeling responsible for our every word and deed. Each moment, billions of people affect each other by ceaselessly painting each other’s souls with their emotions. When we are happy, we make the world around us more beautiful, and when we are sad we make it uglier. We’re all accidental painters of souls using our emotions for colors. We are part of the global painting we helped create. It’s a global painting which we will continue to paint while living in it. Every person is an accidental painter of souls, even if they don’t have the slightest idea how to paint. We all know how to feel. Even the most apathetic person knows how to feel. We often choose not to feel, not to use the emotions because they carry more truth in them than we can bear. As long as we know how to feel, we end up painting the souls of the people around us with our own emotions. We are what we turn the world around us into. We will feel what we make the world around us feel. We live in the world we helped create. We are billions of accidental painters of souls, not only painting the world with our emotions, but living permanently inside our own creations.

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154

We will feel the emotions we create in the people around us. Have you ever seen happy people inflict pain on the people next to them? Have you ever seen sad people dishing out joy to try to make the people around them ha...

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We will feel what we make others feel. The misery we inflict on the world around us will become our next tears, and the happiness we shower it with will become our next smiles.

156

Our body creates our age, and we create the age we feel we are. Happiness subtracts and misery adds days to our age. A happy person feels like a five–year–old kid while a miserable one feels as old as the pyramids.

Our body creates our age, and we create the age we feel we are. Happiness subtracts and misery adds days to our age. A happy person feels like a five–year–old kid while a miserable one feels as old as the pyramids.

We can’t change our age, but we can create how old we feel we are. We have two ages: the calendar age and the emotional age. The first one is the age that the calendar shows we are, while the second is the age we feel we are. The age we feel we are is our calendar age after subtracting every moment of our life we were happy and adding every moment we were miserable. Thus, every happy moment we live is subtracted from our age and every miserable one is counted twice. Life honors its symmetry, especially the one we violate. It rewards us by subtracting from our age every moment we enjoyed by making it beautiful and punishes us by adding to our age every moment we tossed in the garbage by making it ugly. The age that matters most, the one that determines how much we enjoy our lives, is our emotional age, not our calendar age. What does calendar age matter if we feel twenty years older or twenty years younger than our calendar age? Before we see it, we paint the world around us with the emotions we have at any given moment in our soul. If we feel good about ourselves, everything around us seems more lively, more beautiful and happier, more optimistic, and so we feel younger than our calendar age. The opposite happens when we do not feel good about who we are. So, our age, how old we feel, determines how we see ourselves and the world around us, and not how the world sees us. Our emotions determine our age. What have we accomplished by being twenty yet feeling like we are seventy? Instead, how beautiful is it to be seventy and feel twenty? Our body creates our age, and we create the age we feel we are. Our happiness and our sorrow create our age. Our optimism and our pessimism create our age. Our truth and our lies create our age. Our dreams and our fears create our age. How we feel adds or subtracts days, years, even decades from our calendar age. Misery accelerates aging by robbing our energy, poise and optimism. Happy people feel like a child, even if they are old, and miserable ones feel old, even if they are teenagers.

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157

Life is a game of chance which we will never learn how to play as long as we allow our weaknesses to change the rules every time we become good at it.

158

We become what we feel. People who enjoy their life remain young, no matter how old they may be.

159

Aging makes access to sadness easier because the older we get the better we become at using darkness to hide than using light to discover.

160

We don’t age, we just keep getting older. As long as we write more than we erase, learn more than we forget, liberate more than we enslave, build more than we tear down, donate more than we keep for ourselves, hope more ...

We don’t age, we just keep getting older. As long as we write more than we erase, learn more than we forget, liberate more than we enslave, build more than we tear down, donate more than we keep for ourselves, hope more than we fear, we won’t age, we’ll just keep getting older.

Optimists never age, they just keep getting older. Pessimists age before they even get to be old. The speed of our aging is determined by the outcome of our battle with the unknown. The more comfortable we feel with all that we don’t know, the less discouraged we get about how much we still have to learn. We thus remain as optimistic as we need to feel that there are many battles still to be won, ending up feeling younger than the days we’ve lived. We create ignorance to avoid realizing what we know and how much more we still have to learn. We create the unknown, so we won’t allow our knowledge to force us to realize the truth of who we are. To avoid knowing the truth, we hide in the ambiguity offered to us by everything we do not know. We won’t feel old as long as we defend the truth of who we are and refuse to back down in the fight against our weaknesses which want us to lie to ourselves. They know all too well that, every time we lie to ourselves, we become weak and vulnerable enough for them to overpower us. We will feel young as long as we can bear to look in the eye our soul and her truth, the truth of who we are, especially those weaknesses of ours that form its ugliest and most painful part. As long as we don’t flinch from trying to get to know our flaws well enough to disarm them, we will feel younger than our age, younger than the days we lived. We will feel younger than our age as long as we fill our soul with sunshine, and not darkness, as long as we are willing to know our weaknesses instead of allowing them to ruin our lives by making us as miserable as they are. As long as we write more than we erase, learn more than we forget, liberate more than we enslave, build more than we tear down, donate more than we keep, hope more than we fear, we may keep getting older but we won’t age.

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161

We age by betraying our soul.

162

When we learn our weaknesses well enough to disarm them, we will stop living our life by donating to them the most precious asset we own, our time.

163

Today creates a tomorrow to live and a tomorrow to waste.

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Happiness is the best antidote to aging.

165

Instead of living ahead of our truth, we live behind our excuses. Instead of living ahead of our truth to protect it from attacks by the reality we live in, we live behind our excuses to shield ourselves from it.

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We either tell the truth or we tell the excuses which our lies have made for us.

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The greatest source of misery in the world are the people who, unable to get to know their weaknesses as well as needed to disarm them, keep flooding the world with the ugliness born from the defeats they constantly suff...

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Death is the first time in someone’s life when the infinite finds a way to become zero.

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There are no draws in life, except the ones our lies invent.

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The world is full of so much failure and misery because the first thing we do when we lose a battle against our weaknesses is to translate this defeat into malice, anger and pain before tossing it to the people around us...

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There is much malice in the world because it is so much easier to lose the next battle with our weaknesses and become mean than to win it and become kind.

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Leave miserable people to their misery. Leave the mean to their meanness. There is no need to respond to the negativity that mean people throw at us because we can’t do anything to mean people which they haven’t already ...

Leave miserable people to their misery. Leave the mean to their meanness. There is no need to respond to the negativity that mean people throw at us because we can’t do anything to mean people which they haven’t already done to themselves.

We are the biggest victims of our malice. There is nobody whom our weaknesses hate more than us. Let us stop blaming our opponents, let’s stop blaming the mean people around us for the sadness we feel, let us stop blaming them for the bad things that happen to us. We are the ones who, through our weaknesses, construct a very large part of our sorrow and misery. Castles fall from within. If we are strong enough, we will be able to withstand the attacks of even the most ruthless adversaries. Of course, there are other external factors coming from the environment we live in that make us sad, but as long as we are not proud enough of who we are to like ourselves, we will be all too willing to betray ourselves by giving the key to our front door to our opponents. As long as we don’t love who we are, we will be betraying ourselves by being only too willing to become our own Trojan horse that opens our gates for the enemy to enter, conquer us and make us who they want us to be. It is we, nonetheless, who stand in front of the fork of the momentary and the eternal, having the choice to either defend our happiness, or leaving it at the mercy of their attacks. Our sadness is ours, and so is our joy. It is our choice to be as happy as we can, or let the ugliness of those around us make us as miserable as they are. As long as we don’t know our weaknesses well enough to deter them from becoming closely allied with the weaknesses of the people next to us, their meanness will keep getting converted into our pain.

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173

The value of kindness is proven by how miserable mean people are.

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We either become kind enough to be happy or mean enough to be sad.

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The splendor of a person is proven by their capability to produce beauty, even when they don’t feel beautiful.

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It is easy to be kind, generous and human when we are happy and extremely hard when we are sad. In the middle of a celebration everyone loves everyone but at the end of it they are often left alone, trying to convince th...

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Kindness is the most underrated beauty in the world.

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There are people who produce happiness and share it with the world around them, some keep it imprisoned inside them because they are afraid of the truth it is made of, and yet others who steal it from their fellow human ...

There are people who produce happiness and share it with the world around them, some keep it imprisoned inside them because they are afraid of the truth it is made of, and yet others who steal it from their fellow human beings and become more sad than smart.

We live by either adding to or subtracting from the world around us. There are two kinds of people; the “+people”, the builders of happiness, the people who add to the world around them by making it more beautiful, better and happier with their words and deeds, and the “–people”, the thieves of smiles, the abductors of beauty, the people who subtract from the world around them, making it worse, uglier and sadder. What does a taker, someone who subtracts from the world they live in, add to it? Only their ugliness. The thieves of happiness substitute their own ugliness for all that they take away from the people around them. All they leave to the world is their ugliness, debris and open wounds. No matter how many lies we tell ourselves to concoct soothing, yet hollow, excuses so we won’t feel guilty for what our words and deeds do to the world around us, each one of us either adds to, or subtracts from the world around. Only totally detached hermits who live far from anyone do not affect the world around them with their words and deeds. For the rest of us, our every word and every deed either makes the world around us more beautiful, better and happier or makes it uglier, worse and more miserable.

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179

We create beauty every moment we defend our uniqueness by defeating that part of our character which wants to make us more normal than happy.

180

We’ll become happy when we stop becoming the conquerors of other peoples’ beauty instead of conquerors of our own ugliness.

181

We adore learning without realizing because it makes us feel clever enough not to offend our stupidity and truthful enough not to offend our lies.

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People who live immersed in the mistakes they haven’t made yet, will make them.

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Our future is as optimistic as we are.

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We live balancing between our cowardice and our dreams, fighting to become the person we always wanted to be, before the person we have become drown us in their fears.

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Contrary to us, our future never promises, but always delivers. Our future will give us what we gave it.

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People who aren’t afraid of the future are those who are not afraid of their selves, because they know the truth of who they are.

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People who live by both glorifying and mourning the person they will never become, throw away in the garbage the person they already are.

188

How much moderation the ten happiest moments of our life had? Not much. That is why we remember them.

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Life is a race between too much and too little, which moderation frequently wins, but rarely enjoys.

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The curse of reckless people is that they rarely win and the curse of cautious people is that they even more rarely allow themselves to enjoy their victories.

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If you’re going to fall moderately in love, don’t fall in love at all. If you’re going to believe moderately in your beliefs, don’t believe at all. If you’re going to feel in moderation, don’t feel at all.

If you’re going to fall moderately in love, don’t fall in love at all. If you’re going to believe moderately in your beliefs, don’t believe at all. If you’re going to feel in moderation, don’t feel at all.

Is it worthwhile to feel in moderation? Is it worthwhile to believe in our beliefs in moderation? Is it worth falling moderately in love? We adore but also fear love because we know that there is no love which doesn’t want to bulldoze any apathy, idleness and inactivity that we’ve built from our fear of facing our truth. We are comfortable in apathy, idleness and inactivity because we feel so comfortable in the lie we make out of our refusal to face the truth of who we are which our emotions carry with them whenever they go. We fear love because we fear the truth it is made of. We fear love because we know it wants to push us to reach our limits, to become so extreme by feeling the most intense and courageous emotions that it will manage to unshackle us from all the lies we have in us. We fear love because we know that it often throws us in front of our truth to face it without having the usual bag of phony tricks we construct every time we assign our minds to work for our weaknesses. Is there love that was born to obey any rules, especially the rules of logic? If you seek moderation, go to your logic, because your soul will kick you out. Intensity. Exaggeration. Exuberance. Three words which, because our soul has so much confidence in them, we end up adoring more than we trust them. We don’t trust them because we know that, in order to escape the assurance that the center of our character gives us and go to its extremes, we must leave behind our laziness, cowardice and fakery and give sweat, security and truth. We don’t like to take risks because we know that danger, by forcing us to prove whether we believe more in our beliefs than in our lies, will reveal the truth of who we are we’ve been hiding for so long.

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192

Never become so small just so you feel large enough.

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The dark privilege of age is that, the older we get, the better we become at making mistakes while convincing ourselves that we’re making the right decision.

194

We weave dreams out of infinity and fears out of zero.

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I will live a life without hating, not because I am kindhearted, but because I won’t feel the need to bring down anyone to feel superior, I won’t feel the need to take away what they own to feel I have enough, and I won’...

196

The worst torturer in the world is our best self.

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Ugly is a beauty that doesn’t make the world around it happier.

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To win the battle against the ugliness around us, we must first believe in our own beauty.

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We are high–wire walkers who, while trying to balance between our two beauties – what we show we are and what we actually are – do all we can to avoid falling into our only ugliness.

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Genuine people use their truth to become happier, while fake ones are used by their lies to make themselves so complicated and artificial they can’t be anything but miserable.

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If we hate ugliness so much, why do we use it so often?

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There is one road that malice knows better than anyone: the road to misery.

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There is no beauty that doesn’t reveal the ugliness around it.

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Perhaps the mistake we make which has the largest impact on the quality of our life is that, whenever we are unable to touch our beauty, we surrender to our ugliness.

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We are the favorite prey of our weaknesses, even if we have convinced ourselves that they only attack to hurt the people around us.

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Don’t let the ugliness of a person close to you become your ugliness, nor let their defeats become your pain.

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Our greatest beauty is the part of our ugliness we don’t allow to become the sadness of the people around us.

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Beauty punishes those people who force it to make them charming rather than happy.

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The beauty we create for the world around us will often introduce us for the first time to the part of our own character we’ve never considered beautiful.

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There is so much more beauty around us than we see because our own ugliness does everything to prevent us from touching it so we don’t feel comparatively even uglier than we are.

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If you want to feel pretty, become happy.

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Let your optimism discover your courage before your pessimism discovers the part of your cowardice you claim that isn’t yours.

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Let us stop redecorating ugliness and start beautifying it.

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Life will allow us to discover its beauty when we stop demanding that it becomes even more beautiful.

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Our own ugliness is often the reason we can’t enjoy the beauty around us.

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The pain that the revelation of a truth causes is analogous to the lies we’ve used to hide it.

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How can there not be so much misery in the world when we so often become prisoners of our ugliness instead of the liberators of our beauty?

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We adore mediocrity more than we hate it because it’s very easy to be mediocre, much more difficult to be good and unbearably hard to be perfect.

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Beauty is the liberation from ugliness.

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A soul’s beauty is the world’s most frequent prisoner.

Prison guards worship freedom because they know they are its prisoners. We are the prison guards who never stop worshiping freedom so we can trample upon it without feeling guilty. We are threatened by what we cannot understand and persecuted by what we can’t realize. We’ve made our soul a giant, invisible prison cell we filled with those truths of ours which we’ve taken the right to speak the truth away from. It is the prison cell in which we’ve thrown every part of ourselves that is willing to testify to us, and the world around us, about the truth of who we are. The one pain in the world we cannot bear is to learn the truth of who we are. We made our soul a series of invisible prison cells which we’ve filled with anything that threatens us because, having in it more truth than we can bear, we are unable to understand it. We often fill those prison cells with our emotions, our most tireless evangelists of truth – especially our most dynamic ones, like our pathos and enthusiasm. It is those emotions of ours that carry such a large part of our truth in them that we are so afraid to allow them to come out of our soul and become the beauty of the world around us, and though it our own beauty, our own happiness. Thus, with each passing day we end up feeling as ugly as our lies and not as beautiful as our truth. Every time we imprison inside us the beauty of our soul, preventing it from going to the world around us to show our truth, we feel ugly and sad, no matter how beautiful we appear to be. The reward we give our enthusiasm and pathos for being the best ambassadors of the truth of our soul is that we often end up imprisoning them forever inside us, so they won’t tell the world around us how much more true, emotional and humane we are than what our public image shows.

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221

We are our worst sycophants. Let us stop imprisoning our happiness in our cowardice to defend what makes us feel proud of who we are.

As long as we refuse to defend what makes us feel happy, we will feel sad. As long as we don’t want to realize what makes us happy, we will live hiding in our sadness. As long as we fail to realize what makes us beautiful, we will feel threatened by our own beauty! We’ve filled the prison cells inside us with any parts of our character which threaten the pinnacle of our creativity – our lies – because they want to go out and run from end to end of the world around us telling the truth of who we really are. So, we end up being the false advertisers of ourselves, our own sycophants. The more lies we have told ourselves, the fuller are the prison cells, within which we have incarcerated the truth and any part of our character that is willing to represent and defend it. Thus, we live by letting our lies free to go as far as they can in the world around us to become the hard working advertisers of our ugliness, while we keep the truth of who we are imprisoned inside us. And all this is while pretending to be unable to explain to ourselves why we end up having so many fake and unhealthy relationships! The prisons of logic are full of enthusiasm that broke its rules. When will we finally realize that there is no emotion that doesn’t want to break the rules of logic? We have filled the prison cells inside us with enthusiasm and pathos that we never allowed to reach the souls of the people next to us who longed so much for them. We have filled the cells inside us with celebrations that never started, smiles we never allowed to reach our mouths to become joy, glances that carried so much truth inside them that we chose to force them to look elsewhere so as to not make us more real than we can bear to be.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

222

A smile is born every time we discover a reason to be happy before a reason to be sad discovers us.

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Only genuine people, people who have told themselves the truth and don’t pretend they are someone else, fit inside the person they really are. The rest constantly fight and fail, ending up living in exile from themselves...

224

I will become the truth of who I really am, and not the lies that are convenient for me, or for others, to be.

225

We rarely betray that which hurts us all the time: our weaknesses, but we so often betray that which will never abandon us: our beliefs.

226

Often the most rewarding moments of our life are those when we choose not to become our most profitable self, but the most emotionally honest one.

227

We either believe in our beliefs or in the lies we hide them with.

228

Often the longest trip in the world is to stay where we are. Often, the greatest distance in the world is to go nowhere.

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Life is a vast plain which, in seconds, can transform itself into an excruciatingly small cell.

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The people who succeed and are happy are those who, by stopping lying to themselves, become as real as the reality live in.

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As long as we loathe reality because it has more truth in it than we would like, we become as fake as needed to feel unsuccessful and sad.

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We lie to invent a reality that is as real as it must be to not bother us and as fake as it needs to be to comfort us.

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The best way to stop feeling failed and miserable is to become good enough to win and be happy.

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We don’t like to take risks because we know that danger, forcing us to prove how much more we believe in our beliefs than in our lies, reveals the truth of how afraid of our weaknesses we are.

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Miserable are the people who avoid enjoying the happiness of the world around them to prevent it from showing and proving to them how comparatively sad they are.

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Every time we compare ourselves with others, we compare ourselves against our best self.

237

Fake people feel less because they fear the truth their emotions carry in them.

Fake people are usually sad because, by fearing the truth their emotions carry in them, are afraid to access the happiness that lives in their souls. Our emotions are the messengers of our alpha truth. When we get to know our weaknesses, which are the most painful, ugly and sad part of the truth of who we are, we will stop being afraid of it, and so we will not be afraid to let the most spontaneous part of our character come out and show our real selves. We have told so many lies to ourselves that the truth is especially painful. True people are not afraid of the truth because they have already shown it. On the contrary, fakes dread the truth because they know how much pain they feel every time they stumble upon it, and it proves to them how fake they’ve let all the lies they told themselves make them. That is why they live hidden behind their lies, knowing that their emotions can only harm them by exposing how fake they have become. They are so afraid to find out the truth of who they really are because then they will have to throw in the trash what is for many the pinnacle of their creativity, their lies. How can we not be so afraid to feel, how can we not be so afraid of our very soul, when we fight with everything we've got to know her so little that we allow ourselves to become as fake as we must be to win the battles that our truth, our real capabilities, cannot win? We believed our lies so much that we stopped trusting our truth. How can we not be miserable when we believe the lies – which shower us with instant victories and eternal misery – more than we believe the truth, which gives us happiness that might hurt for a brief time but lasts forever? How can we not be sad when we are so addicted to instant ease and immediate comfort that we are not even willing to bear the temporary pain of truth that the demolishing of the lies with which we have been covering it with for so long produces? What is a person without their lies? Happy.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

238

If you don’t know who to become, be the truth you feel and not the lies you think of.

Let us stop allowing our cowardice to steal the screams of joy our soul so often gives birth to so it can celebrate the beauty it feels. How happy can a scream of joy be that can only whisper? Let us free ourselves from the whisper we became to avoid disturbing the people around us who choose to clothe themselves with their silence because they fear to allow their words reveal the truth they feel rather than the lies they are thinking of. Let’s leap out of our fear of saying or doing something that is so real it will annoy the lies manufactured by our cowardice to defend the truth of who we really are. Let’s stop lying to convince ourselves that it is not our fault we are miserable but someone else’s, often blaming the reality we live in, or even our luck. We are to blame for our misery much more than anybody else, even the people who hate us the most. Let's stop allowing miserable people to fill our lives with the ugliness and pain their defeats in the battles with their own weaknesses have caused them. Let's stop letting them make us as sad as they are. Let’s get rid of the so convenient self–made vagueness we ran to hide in so many times throughout our life to avoid looking the truth of who we are in the eye. Instead, let us set ourselves free to be as real as our emotions and not as able, cunning and profitable as our thoughts. Life likes to force us to choose between being happy or being winners. It does that because it knows that happiness is the greatest victory in the world.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

239

The beauty each of us produces belongs more to the world than to us.

240

People who let others define for them what is right and what is wrong just survive, while people who allow their own beliefs to define right and wrong feel so proud of themselves that they can’t be anything but happy.

241

As long as we choose to do what is easy instead of what is right, we will continue to fail and be miserable.

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If the right choice were the easiest, then the world would overflow with happiness and success and no one would have to try to become better because we would all be already perfect.

243

Nobody works harder than our laziness to convince us not to try.

244

We made our laziness our preferred way to avoid discovering the truth of who we are.

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Lazy is one who suffers more from trying than from losing.

246

Our cowardice makes a zero for us to hide in and our courage an infinity to enjoy.

The infinite knows what freedom is and the zero what freedom would have been. Let us stop making zero out of every moment we wait for the spectacular and the gigantic to rush at us, and let’s start building the infinite out of countless minimal opportunities that life, with a help of our body, keeps giving us. The infinite is made out of countless minimal opportunities which our courage seized, while the zero is fashioned out of the one grand excuse our cowardice was always able to manufacture. We often choose to weave our life out of countless minimal excuses not to live, which become minimal deaths. Every excuse not to live our life to the max most apogee is a minimal death sentence we hand out to ourselves. We only live in those moments of our lives when we set aside our weaknesses which never stop urging us to run and hide in zero so we won’t ever become the person our abilities can make us. We only live in those moments of our lives when we don’t hide from our good qualities to avoid discovering how far we can go, how high we can fly. We give ourselves a chance to enjoy every moment of our life when we tell the truth to ourselves and throw in the garbage every moment when we lie to ourselves. We only live those moments of our lives when we allow our soul to feel so intensely, even if that leads us to discover from our emotions the truth of who we truly are. The rest of the time, we just turn our backs to our life, ignore it, choose not to take the risk and live it, no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves otherwise. Life gives us a new opportunity every four seconds. Let us stop throwing it in the trash. Let's grab it and give it a chance to explain to us how we can become who we want to be.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

247

Self–knowledge creates infinity out of the solutions to our problems and the lack of it creates a zero out of cheap excuses.

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We often like to become the obligatory children of paradox and the voluntary parents of the self–evident.

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We sacrifice the eternal at the altar of the temporary. As long as we sacrifice the eternal at the altar of the temporary, we will keep filling our life with temporary joy and eternal sadness.

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The right choice is usually the opposite of the easy one, because, if the easy choice led to success and happiness, then most people on earth would be extremely successful and deliriously happy, while failure and sadness...

251

We will become victims of our stupidity before we become victims of our bad luck.

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We’ve become a society of involuntary spectators of truth, who choose to rarely realize what they learn.

253

Any escape route from reality is a one way street leading to those weaknesses of ours that created it.

254

Nothing beats sadness easier than a smile we believe so much in that we allow it to show us in which part of our sorrow we have hidden every reason we have to be happy.

255

Time is the form of energy which, because we understand it less than any other, we end up wasting most of all.

Who said that we only spend time? We destroy time and we create time. We destroy time with every moment we throw in the trash by refusing to live it, to enjoy it, to create, to be happy. We destroy time on each occasion when we force our soul to touch her ugliness and translate it into apathy, malice and sorrow. On the contrary, we create time with every moment of our lives we don’t waste by allowing our soul free to translate her passion, and enthusiasm and beauty into creation, joy and happiness. We create time every moment we realize what we’ve learned and throw in the garbage every moment we don’t. To protect ourselves from the part of our knowledge that offends our uniqueness, we became very good at learning and even worse at realizing what we’ve learned. We create time every moment we produce beauty, and we destroy it every moment we produce ugliness. People who create beauty prolong their lives and people who create ugliness make their lives seem shorter. Is there a greater pity than living a life which, not having the courage to live their life to the max, we seem to make shorter than it actually is? Truth is the most exquisite beauty in the world, no matter how ugly it often seems to be. Truth is the most exquisite beauty because it knows better than anyone else the road to happiness. Truth and beauty create time, while lies and ugliness destroy it. Since our truth is our beauty, our life constantly becomes a choice between beauty and truth or ugliness and lies. We create time every moment we either get better at what we do, learn something more about ourselves or enjoy our lives. Truth and beauty open doors while ugliness and lies close them. We create time because positive energy and beauty generate additional energy and beauty for us and those close to us, opening doors that were previously closed.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

256

The greatest miracles happen when our mind and our soul stop fighting each other and become one.

257

Each one of us can become a wonderful factory that generates time, as long as we overcome those weaknesses of ours that constantly try to stop us, disappoint us, make us throw in the towel and force us to quit before we ...

258

Good energy creates infinity and bad energy creates countless zeros.

The next moment of our life will treat us as we treat it. Let us smile at the next moment of our life and it will smile back at us. We create time every moment we fully utilize our strengths, every moment we use the full edition of ourselves, the one with all our good qualities, not just a tiny fraction of them. We create time every moment we rev up our soul and our brain and raise the volume in our lives. We create time every moment we dare to look our weaknesses in the eye and dare to say “no” to them and every moment we confront the roots of our cowardice and become as optimistic as we must to believe in our dreams. We create time every moment we confront the causes of our meanness and become kind enough to be happy. We create time every moment we are not afraid of our worst fears and allow our soul to feel so free that she can defeat all the pointless rules we’ve let our normality saturate our lives with. We create time every moment we become strong enough not to be afraid to dig deep into our soul to try to discover all the gifts, beauty and surprises it has. We create time every moment we respect so much that it invites us to find the beauty it has in it so we can turn it into a colorful celebration of joy and not an emotionally devastated parade of yawns. We create time every moment we realize how grateful we should be for the luck of having more breaths in our lungs without having to do anything to deserve them. We create time every moment we push aside our greed to let us feel the pleasure we receive from all that we already have rather than the pain we get from all that we don’t. We create time every moment we disarm our ugliness so it can let us see how beautiful the world around us is, and every moment we stop living with our eyes fixed on anything ugly around us so we can feel comparatively more beautiful. We finally create time every moment we stop looking for someone weaker than us so we can go stand next to them and feel comparatively stronger. Let's try to improve the relationship we have with time because time is the form of energy which, because we understand it less than any other, we end up wasting most of all.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

259

We create time every moment of our life we respect enough not to waste.

260

We will live and enjoy only the part of our life we dare to discover.

261

We waste time by doing as few things as we can to protect ourselves from doing something that may uncover the truth of whether we are good enough to win and be happy or bad enough to lose and become sad.

262

Every hour has as many minutes as our love for life wants it to have.

263

Time is our ally, not our enemy. The more we antagonize time, the more we get defeated by it.

264

Our fake self wastes our life and our true self lives it.

265

We are obsessed about making our life longer while we do our utmost to make it shorter, by wasting such a large part of it.

266

We create the time we don’t waste. Time not wasted is time created.

267

Beauty is born to defeat the sadness that ugliness produces.

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269

Although we will never give the wheel of the car we are driving to another person, we too often end up giving up the wheel of our soul to people who all they want is to drive us to misery.

We are tycoons of logic and beggars of the counter intuitive. We often become more rational than necessary, and thus, every once in a while, we fall at our feet and beg the paradox to explain to us, not only what is happening around us, but also what is happening inside us. We believe in the counter-intuitive more than we admit to avoid offending our logic. How much do we believe in logic when, disappointed by the defeat produced by the choices our logic makes for us, we end up asking the paradoxical, the counter intuitive, to explain to us not only why we lost but also who we are? Let's respect our happiness more. Let's stop taking it for granted and protect it. No one else will. Life doesn't give away happiness and, when it does, it usually shares it with those who deserve it because they are willing to fight as hard as they need to protect it. There is no life without struggle. The more addicted to ease we become, the deeper we delve into the spectator’s chair, and the more we invite our life to remind us that there is no free success, certainly not the greatest success of all: happiness. If success and happiness were free, then all people in the world would be extremely successful and deliriously happy. Reality proves the opposite. So, let us fight and defend our happiness. Let us stop doing what is easy and start doing what is right.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

270

When we create a life we can fall in love with, the sadness anything negative creates will be cut in half and the happiness that anything positive creates will be doubled.

271

Love makes life easy, indifference makes it difficult, and hatred unbearable.

When we love what we do, our effort to achieve it becomes simpler, easier, and any negativity it causes becomes less stressful and painful. Every moment, our happiness is shaped by the relationship between the cost we have to pay and the physical as well as emotional benefit we receive for anything we do or say. Life often becomes the invisible relationship between the cost and benefit of everything we say and do. It becomes a miserable fight when the cost is greater than the benefit and a dance of pleasure when the opposite happens. When we love what we do, our life becomes effortless and more optimistic, while our future becomes more attractive because the benefits, positives and pleasure we receive are significantly bigger than the cost, negativity and discomfort of the effort we put in. The way to minimize the discomfort and pain of doing something is to do things we enjoy. How much we enjoy every moment of our life is determined by the emotional benefits, such as joy, pleasure, pride, and self-confidence, we receive from what we do in relation to the physical and emotional costs. These can be the discomfort, pain, obstacles, difficulty, negativity, and sorrow that we have to overcome to make it happen. So, rather than just blindly doing what others push us to do, even if it is considered socially acceptable, let's give our beliefs and the truth of who we really are the opportunity to create a life so beautiful that we fall in love with it. Needless to say, we must live within the rules and laws of society, but by no means should we let what is widely considered conventional and normal cut off our wings and steal our dreams. Everything becomes easier when the benefit of what we do is greater than its cost. Everything we do includes beauty and ugliness, joy and sorrow, the excitement of possible victory and the crash landing of possible failure. Nothing will be given to us for free, except everything we do not want to have anyway. We must give sweat, security, and truth to achieve success, especially happiness, the greatest success of all. For almost everything we want to achieve in life, we have to give sweat, security, and truth to make the effort, take risks, and tell ourselves the truth about those weaknesses of ours that need to be disarmed to prevent them from pushing us towards failure and those strengths of ours that must be used to achieve success. There are no free victories in life, except fake ones. Life does not give away free victories, and it certainly does not give away the greatest victory of all, happiness. Defeats are as cheap as victories are expensive. Since stupidity is free and wisdom is expensive, losing is extremely easy; we just let our weaknesses defeat us. On the contrary, winning is difficult, as we must first defeat our weaknesses to get a chance to defeat our opponent. The more we love what we do, the easier it becomes to be good at it, as we are not too intimidated by the cost we pay to achieve it. The more we love something, the less difficult and painful is its achievement because the benefits, that is, the enjoyment we get from it, is so much greater than the cost, that is, the pain and discomfort we suffer to achieve it.

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272

Happy are those who have created a life they love so much that they make it seem easy, even if it is not. Miserable are those who hate their lives so much that everything seems difficult, even if it is not.

273

Life is a gigantic parade of beauty that is often interrupted by many brief demonstrations of ugliness.

If we don’t hastily defend ourselves against the ugliness, it can become bigger than anything beautiful we experience and drown us in its sadness. Let's choose. Either we disarm the ugliness and liberate ourselves from its negativity, or we become its prisoner. Either we explain to ourselves those weaknesses of ours that produce or enlarge the ugliness that other people have produced, or we allow it make us sad as it wants. Either we defeat the ugliness or it defeats us. Nothing can exist between victory and defeat except the crafty draws our lies invent to hide our inability to win. Life comprises of times of beauty that overflow with opportunities for joy, creativity, and happiness that are interrupted - often abruptly - by times of ugliness that are replete with difficulty, problems, and negativity. When we get to know ourselves, especially our weaknesses, as well as it takes to disarm them, we will be able to overcome any negativity we encounter in our environment or give birth to ourselves. In this way, we will be able to take from it the power to make our lives as bad as it wants. Let’s get to know our weaknesses well enough to prevent them from becoming the best allies of every negativity, problem, and difficulty we face, so they can help them defeat us and make us as miserable as they are. This way, we will not let it steal the smile from our faces and the sunshine from our lives by forcing us onto anything that makes us miserable.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

274

Optimism will win the battle that pessimism has lost before it even begins.

275

Let's stop living as fugitives of the truth of who we are, by embracing any part of it that make us better and happier and changing any part of it that make us worse and more miserable.

276

We wear high heels on our self-worth before we parade it to the people around us, so we can seduce them enough to dissuade them from trying to discover our real value.

277

Many of us pretend to be gods without even knowing how to be human.

278

“Why” is the most annoying word in the world because it can become the most useful.

279

We glorify whatever we don’t want to become.

280

Our life loves the duality we hate because it hates the security we adore.

281

Let's create a life that has countless opponents and not one enemy.

282

Let's live by sharing the beauty of our soul with the people around us and explaining its ugliness until it no longer makes us feel so sad that we feel the need to attack them and make them suffer as much as we do.

Let's live by sharing the beauty of our soul with the people around us and explaining its ugliness until it no longer makes us feel so sad that we feel the need to attack them and make them suffer as much as we do.

Let's initiate a domino effect of beauty, or continue one set into motion by someone else, by sharing the happiness we have inside us with the next person we meet. We will, therefore, make that one square foot of land that belongs to us more beautiful, happier. We will receive from the world around us any emotion we give it. This is the highest, kindest, most generous thing we can do in our lives. It is the highest peak we can conquer. We often become the exact opposite of what we failed to become. The edges are closer to each other than to the center, even if it is located right between them. Let's stop hiding behind the excuse that there is nothing we can do about the ugliness and misery of the entire planet. Let's do what we can to change the one square foot of land where we stand. It is astonishing how much we affect the world around us, positively or negatively – definitely more than we think. A smile and a tear can recreate a whole life from the beginning. We paint the world around us with the emotions we have in our soul. Every time we remove ugliness from the world we live in, we add beauty to it. This way, we may offer something to the world we live in to honor the symmetry of all that it has been giving us for so long. We make the world we live in more beautiful by saving it from our own ugliness.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

283

The best relationships of my life have been those where i told the truth of who i am to others by offering them, not only what makes me beautiful, but also what makes me ugly, by revealing everything and hiding nothing.

284

Relationships should achieve their symmetry, or end.

285

My life cannot become a dance floor at any given moment, however it should never become a boxing ring. People who turn their life into a boxing ring become winners who lost.

286

There are no simple relationships, because there are no simple people. Our relationships will become as complicated as our fears or as simple as our hopes.

287

I felt so loved everytime, people, without expecting any emotional gain, gave a piece of their strength to me so they could help me overcome my weaknesses, instead of trying to find their own strength in what makes me we...

288

A relationship often turns into a fight between two people searching for a way to defend who they become when they are together, without betraying who they are when alone.

289

We might conquer the people around us by charming them with our lies, but we will never make them love us until we show them the truth of who we are.

290

We are the prisoners of our expectations.

291

Genuine people turn truth into happiness, while fake people turn it into pain.

292

People change when they can no longer afford to remain the same.

293

The truth has always ended anything I did not have the courage to finish myself.

294

Stay away from people who hold you hostage to the good they think they are doing to you.

295

First dates often become the advertisement of the people we wished we were, but cannot become.

296

Rarely does the truth go to the first date, but it always goes to the last one.

297

A first date is often filled with so many fairy tales that even the truth seems fake.

298

Life is the battle between the sad freedom of loneliness and the happy confinement of a relationship.

299

The freedom of loneliness is the saddest freedom in the world, and the occasional limitations of a good relationship are the happiest confinement.

300

It is very hard not to imprison ourselves in the arrogance that absolute freedom breeds. “Absolute” and “arrogance” are as good friends as “measured” and “humility”. It is very hard to have the freedom to become whoever ...

Quotes

1

At the end of every day the truth of who we are brings us the bill to pay for every word we said and every action we did during it. When we pay it in full, we see dreams at night and when we don’t, we see nightmares.

2

Why be like lions living the life of cockroaches? We fail because the demands of greatness are huge and of failure, none. We are sad because the demands of happiness are great and of misery, none.

3

4

5

Beauty is born to defeat the sadness that ugliness produces.

6

Life is the celebration of beauty, but even more so, the celebration of an ugliness that was never born because it was explained. Every time we manage to explain to ourselves what makes us feel ugly, a celebration of beauty begins.

7

The more we love, the less we fear. When we’re not afraid to love, we fear nothing.

8

Liars have all it takes to be sad because, by fearing the truth, they end up fearing their own soul that produces it.

9

To protect ourselves from what we shouldn’t know, we live by learning a lot and forgetting even more.

10

11

We've made ignorance our favourite excuse for not living.

12

Nobody becomes happy accidentally. Happy are the people who don’t believe in their sadness.

13

We either create happiness out of truth, or sadness out of lies.

14

True people deserve the beauty of their soul and fake people - the ugliness of their sadness.

15

Our happiness is the cost of lying to ourselves and our loneliness - the cost of lying to others.

16

When we lie to ourselves, we invite other people to lie to us.

17

The huge, indecipherable cost of lying to ourselves is that we end up attracting those people we should keep away.

18

Every moment we live we either tell ourselves the truth and become as real as we need to be happy, or tell ourselves lies and become as fake as we need to be miserable.

19

Since happiness often has more truth in it that we can bear, we often choose, by not choosing, to be sad.

20

There is no lie that ultimately won’t cost more than the truth it was born to hide.

21

Life loves to remind us what we try the hardest to forget.

22

Life is a vast plain which, in seconds, can transform itself into an excruciatingly small cell.

23

The faster we run to escape the person we are, the harder we stumble on it.

24

Our sadness is the truth we never told ourselves.

25

We become as fake as we need to be to feel unhappy.

26

Life often likes to become an impossible choice between success and happiness which most often is won by the people who choose to defend their beliefs from the attacks of the next applause.

27

Silence is the hideout we use when we don’t know how else to avoid realising how much more truthful than us our words can be.

28

When we stop lying, we will become as strong as our truth.

29

We have more power than we know, as long as we can bear to live with the part of our truth it is made from.

30

31

Truth is the only thing in the world that humans will never defeat.

32

Since liars are afraid of the truth, they are afraid of their most truthful part, their soul as much as necessary to avoid feeling and become dispassionate enough to become miserable.

33

Our soul is our greatest source of strength, if only we stopped fearing her just because we’ve left her unknown.

34

Fake escapes lead to brand new prison cells and real ones to old freedoms. People who escape reality fall hard onto those weaknesses of theirs which imprisoned them in it.

35

The life of sad people is a permanent escape from the truth they don’t want to learn.

36

Wise are the people who realise the value of their every breath, even if they don’t realise anything else.

37

The hidden cost of greed is that, while waiting for the extraordinary, we miss the opportunity to enjoy the ordinary.

38

Every moment we refuse to live, we are rehearsing for our death.

39

We only deserve to enjoy those moments of our lives we respect.

40

We have one life to live, one life to enjoy, one life to create, and one life to fall in love with.

41

We belong to every breath of ours. We belong to every breath of ours more than they belongs to us.

42