Omar Itani

“Caring about the happiness of others, we find our own.”
― Plato

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. The mind that responds to the intellectual and spiritual values that lie hidden in a poem, a painting, or a piece of music, discovers a spiritual vitality that lifts it above itself, takes it out of itself, and makes it present to itself on a level of being that it did not know it could ever achieve.”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“A daily routine built on good habits and disciplines separates the most successful among us from everyone else. A routine is exceptionally powerful.”
― Darren Hardy, The Compound Effect

“We should imitate bees,' Seneca wrote, 'and we should keep in separate compartments whatever we have collected from our diverse reading, for things conserved separately keep better. Then, diligently applying all the resources of our native talent, we should mingle all the various nectars we have tasted, and then turn them into a single sweet substance, in such a way that, even if it was apparent where it originated, it appears quite different from what it was in its original state.' Memory, for Seneca as for Erasmus, was as much a crucible as a container. It was more than the sum of things remembered. It was something newly made, the essence of a unique self.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains