entjs:

“Most of us aren’t defeated in a decisive battle. We are defeated one tiny, seemingly insignificant surrender at a time that chips away at who we should really be […] It’s a slow and incremental process chipping away at our will – chipping away at our discipline. We sleep in a little later. We miss a workout, then another. We start to eat and drink what we shouldn’t until you wake up one day and you’ve become something that you never would have allowed.”

— John Willink, Discipline Equals Freedom

objetpetita:

I lead a life much below my level. Beyond the books, which trickle in slowly (I have to read what I can get, not what I have a mind to read), I have nothing to sustain my inner life; and everything around me exudes an indescribable prosiness, which presses down on me too with its brutal weight. Nothing on the order of a stroll with a dear person, not one hour of quiet and serene contemplation–all is tainted by mundane worry and staleness. I take it that productive creators fence themselves off from their environment by a certain regimen of living, a certain organization of their daily routine that does not allow the workaday banality, humdrum job, and the rest of it to get to them. I badly feel the lack of such a regimen, my incapacity to subject myself to such a discipline. One must, for instance, fence off one’s inner life, not permit the vermin of ordinary cares to infest it. Some blindness used to protect me from this truth; I wore blinkers like a horse in harness. Now reality has won and penetrated my interior.

― Bruno Schulz in a letter to Roma Halpern, October 29, 1938