The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.

– Marc Andreessen, Pmarca Guide to Career Planning: Opportunity

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

– Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

The un-paraphrased quote:

I was like the kid wearing an astronaut suit and everybody was like, ‘Why the fuck would you do that?’ But the universe saw me wearing an astronaut suit and was like, ‘We can give it to all the people who aren’t wearing it, or we can just give it to the fucking kid who’s wearing an astronaut suit and make him a spaceship.’

– Colson Baker, a.k.a. Machine Gun Kelly

I am convinced that there exists a mysterious power in writing things down. I don’t know exactly how it works or why it works but I do believe that it works. I have experienced it myself, and I have read about it from others who experienced it themselves.

– Jake, The Mysterious Power of Writing Things Down

The description was about five or six handwritten pages long, and at the time, it was a manifestation of desperate longing to be somewhere other than where I was, someone who felt free and cared for. At the time I saw that description as basically an impossibility; my life could never be so amazing in reality.

Fast forward about seven or ten years and I rediscovered the description when I was moving old notebooks and journals from one dusty storage spot to another. As I read through it, I discovered that 90% of the statements I had made in that description were true (or true in spirit).

– Autotranslucence, Becoming a magician

The faith of all humans conforms to the nature of their mind. All people possess faith, and whatever the nature of their faith, that is verily what they are.

– Bhagavad Gita 17:3

For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he

– The Bible (King James Version), Proverbs 23:7

You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn’t separate from the rest of your existence.

– Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

As a self-modifying system, you directly modify all of reality when you act. Each thought, intention, reaction, emotion, dream, wish, etc directly modifies the state of the entire universe by virtue of you being part of the entire universe

– Loophole Kid, A Practical Philosophy for Flourishing

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. And the minute that you understand that you can poke life, and actually something will, you know, if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can - you can - change it. You can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing… is to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just going to live in it. Versus embrace it. Change it. Improve it. Make your mark upon it.

– Steve Jobs

Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.

– Teller

When you can skillfully control, deepen, and direct your attention, you may discover that life is easier and more malleable than it seemed.

– Nadia Asparouhova, How to do the jhanas

It was very clear that magic was real. What Scooter [Braun] always used to say is “you have to believe.” Again, with my cynicism at that point in my life, I was an asshole 19 year old, I said “oh this is just marketing.” And he was like “no. You have to believe.”

And then I left there and was like why isn’t any of this stuff working? Oh — because I didn’t believe in it.

– John Fio, Creating Magic for Consumers

We construct, through our way of looking, what we experience… Sooner or later we come to realize that perhaps the most fundamental, and most fundamentally important, fact about any experience is that it depends on the way of looking.

…

Other than what we can perceive through different ways of looking, there is no ‘objective reality’ existing independently; and there is no way of looking that reveals some ‘objective reality’.

– Rob Burbea, Seeing that Frees

(For more on this last idea, see my piece on Ways of Looking.)

Have any posts, quotes, or excerpts I should add? Email me.

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