Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.

Jane Kenyon

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“I think I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. Part of it is just learning what makes me happier and doing more of it, and learning what makes me unhappier and doing less of it.”

Mark Frauenfelder

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“The vampires in your life can’t be cured. Your best bet is to stay away from them. As Lynda Barry said, ‘You cannot fix Dracula by trying to convince him to just party in the sun with you.'”

Austin Kleon

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“The healthiest food in the supermarket—the fresh produce—doesn’t boast about its healthfulness, because the growers don’t have the budget or the packaging. Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.”

Michael Pollan

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“I cannot follow you where I will not go.”

Edmond Jabès

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“It’s not food if it’s called by the same name in every language. (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles.)”

Michael Pollan

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“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Michael Pollan

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“If people were to bring their marriages in for a checkup on an annual basis, would that provide the same sort of benefit that a physical health checkup would provide?”

James V. Córdova

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“The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.”

Cyril Connolly

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“Eating what stands on one leg [mushrooms and plant foods] is better than eating what stands on two legs [fowl], which is better than eating what stands on four legs [cows, pigs, and other mammals].”

Michael Pollan

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“Avoid food products that make health claims.”

Michael Pollan

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“Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially ‘on,’ we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing…For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating.”

Jonathan Rauch

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“The reason to travel: there are inner transitions we can’t properly cement without a change of locations.”

Alain de Botton

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“I should add…that just as it is important to avoid trivial conversation, it is important to avoid bad company. By bad company I do not refer only to people who are vicious and destructive; one should avoid their company because their orbit is poisonous and depressing. I mean also the company of zombies, of people whose soul is dead, although their body is alive, of people whose thoughts and conversation are trivial; who chatter instead of talk, and who assert cliché opinions instead of thinking.”

Erich Fromm

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“To get up at a regular hour, to devote a regular amount of time during the day to activities such as meditating, reading, listening to music, walking; not to indulge, at least not beyond a certain minimum, in escapist activities like mystery stories and movies, not to overeat or overdrink are some obvious and rudimentary rules. It is essential, however, that discipline should not be practiced like a rule imposed on oneself from the outside, but that it becomes an expression of one’s own will; that it is felt as pleasant, and that one slowly accustoms oneself to a kind of behavior which one would eventually miss, if one stopped practicing it.”

Erich Fromm

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